I don’t have cable, and I fell asleep before all the results were in on election day (my faith in Nate Silver is strong).
However I have seen some things since the election that imply this was a serious thought among some conservatives during election night, that Romney was winning or would win the popular vote.
Were media outlets like Fox, Drudge, etc. portraying Romney as winning the popular vote up until the very end?
One thing that makes me think this is this video, which shows the drudge report implying Romney was winning the popular vote even as the vote count was nearing the end (it was at about 44 million each in that video, total count was roughly 60 million each)
And like I said, some blog posts from election night imply other conservatives thought the same thing. Obama won the final popular vote by 3.3 million votes. But if you update Obama’s total vote count after Romney’s, it gives the illusion Romney is winning the popular vote.
Did this happen election night in any mainstream conservative news outlets? Was Drudge renewing Obama’s numbers after Romneys and giving the impression Romney was winning, or was Romney actually winning the popular vote when it was at about 44 million each?
Romney was for extended periods early on winning the popular vote by about a 50/48 margin, and there were some comments (not just right-wing media, CBS mentioned it) about how this would potentially weaken a mandate that Obama might have. Of course, only plug ignorance would miss that there were a whole bunch of highly populated, highly Democratic-leaning states that would push the total back into Obama’s favour as they eventually did.
Because they were in denial about losing and were only looking at the then-current vote totals which had not even begun to count the west coast, where Obama was heavily favored.
“How can you be calling it for Obama when Romney is ahead in the popular vote?”
wait for it…
Currently standing at nearly 3.3 million vote margin in favor of President Obama (Nov 11). A 3% margin of victory, 51-48. Obama also carried 27 states, to 23 for Romney.
Pretty odd to be so off the mark in this day and age - Obama averaged a 5% point lead in the States that mattered. Still, no more cuckoo than half the Party.
I was watching Fox News and they were definately playing up the “Obama will win the electoral college but not the popular vote” angle once Ohio was called. Not just discussing the possibility, but treating it as something that had already happened, and going on to discuss the consequences.
It was weird. They were obviously kind of embarrassed about having been proven wrong about their earlier predictions of Romney victory. But then at the same time, they moved to a narrative that not only was almost certainly going to be proven false (as others noted, its not exactly a secret that the Dems have a lot of votes on the West coast), but one that was going to be proven false within a few hours.
It was creepily Pavlovian. Like they couldn’t stop spinning even when they knew how transparent it was getting.
Thats a good point I didn’t think about, west coast states closed the polls later.
California
Hawaii
Idaho
Oregon
Washington
All closed at 11pm. California alone added 2 million to Obama’s margin, Oregon, Hawaii and Washington added another 800k to his margin (he lost 200k in Idaho). So Obama won close to 2.7 million net votes after those 5 states closed so the popular vote was probably a lot closer before those states started counting.
Oh…Don’t worry. I am sure that if you do a poll a few weeks from now you’ll find that there are plenty of conservatives who will still believe that Obama lost the popular vote. It is hard to underestimate the level of denialism that exists in conservative circles. They have made a wholesale decision to abandon reality for fantasy. I am arguing with someone over on WUWT (the biggest global warming denial site) who says “And yes, it is entirely the Obama Administration’s fault. Four years of blaming Bush, who had below a 5% unemployment rate for 8 years, is old and busted partisan nonsense.” After I show him the actual graph of what unemployment did, he responds with, “I note that joelshore confirms exactly what I wrote. Unemployment was extremely low prior to Obama’s election. Then it skyrocketed, specifically due to Obama’s failed policies.”
There is just no way to convince people who have totally subordinated facts to ideology.
It seemed to me the week prior to the elections almost every media outlet was pushing the headlines of polls showing “it’s a dead heat”, “it’s absolutely even”, “they’re neck-n-neck”, etc. which was probably true regarding the popular vote but none of them ever mentioned that. None of them referred to the electoral vote race which IMHO probably wasn’t that close.
It made me think that a lot of the media outlets weren’t putting a left or right spin on it but rather a self-serving get viewers to keep watching spin. A close race is more $$$$ in their pockets.
My local paper (Gannett) had a post-Election Day headline along the lines of: Obama Wins, But Loses Popular Vote. It was probably accurate at the time they went to press, but several low-information voters around here seem to have internalized the idea that Obama didn’t win for real because he didn’t win the popular vote.
It wasn’t true regarding the popular vote. I wasn’t watching any conservative news outlets on Election Night, but I think the main bias here may have just been the “oh, this could be interesting!” bias. Before elections the press often spends a disproportionate amount of its time speculating about outcomes that are very unlikely but would be unusual, like an Electoral College tie or a candidate winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College. It’s a way to take a break from covering the actual news and keep people’s attention.
We spent an hour or so watching the election returns in a bar and I saw a lot of people agonizing over Romney’s lead in the electoral college. Nobody who was stressing seemed to grasp the fact that Obama was going to get 70-odd electoral votes at 11 p.m., as soon as the polls closed on the West Coast. That was as inevitable as the Republicans winning practically everything in the Southeast. That’s pretty much the same thing that happened Tuesday night after the networks had called the election for Obama. If you looked at where the votes were going to come from, it looked unlikely that Romney was going to win the popular vote by the time the election was called. If you just looked at the raw vote numbers and the percentage of votes that were uncounted without noticing where they came from, it looked like Romney might win the popular vote. And based on Twitter you can tell some people shut off their TVs by 11:30 Eastern and still thought Romney won the popular vote the next day.
I agree, and the reason I agree is that MSNBC, which has a distinct Obama bias, was saying the race was way close right up to election day. Even though they had access to Nate Silver’s numbers. They did it for the same reason the conservatives did: to keep viewers interested.
Or, even more cynically - they were trying to keep their largely liberal audience from becoming complacent. You need to vote! Your vote might be the one that does it!
It wasn’t completely a conservative media fabrication. There was some speculation in MSM that Sandy might depress the turnout in Democratic leaning Northeastern states enough that Romney might have a shot at taking the popular vote. Indeed this may have been a factor in him having the lead until the Western states and Hawaii came in.
Did you ever notice on Jeopardy that AT never says that one of the contestants is unbeatable until after they all answer the Final Jeopardy question? I wonder why that is…
Exactly. I get tired every election of all the “projections”. I tune in the get the results. What’s so hard about just reporting things after they actually happen?
(Yeah, I know: competition. Everyone wants to be first with the results.)
Still, this annoys me, and I’d even be so bold as to say it ought to be illegal to broadcast “projected” election results while voting is still in progress.
(What! You mean I might not know who won until TOMORROW?)
