Captain Ed at Hot Air has looked at the presidential and congressional numbers and several startling facts emerge:
Barack Obama certainly won this race, but he won it with just a little more votes than George Bush won in his re-election bid, and the turnout models came up short.
In 2004, Bush beat John Kerry by winning 62.04 million votes. In 2008, Obama won 62.443 million, a gain of only 400,000. In 2004, Kerry garnered 59.028 million votes; John McCain only got 55.386 million. That means this election saw 3.24 million fewer votes than four years ago. Far from being more energized, the nation appeared to be more apathetic.
It doesn’t look as if Obama picked up many new voters. Rather, he was able to turn out his base more effectively than McCain. According to Ed, this is shown in the Congressional numbers:
How do we know that it’s a base turnout rather than a tsunami of opinion to Democrats? For one thing, Dems didn’t pick up a boatload of new seats in the House, and they may underperform expectations yet in the Senate. They did gain some strength with independents, but only gaining between 11-20 seats in the House tells us that they found votes in districts they already control, more than finding converts.
When we get beyond the electoral college numbers, we don’t see any broad shift to Obama at all. Rather, we see seven million fewer voters than 2004 turning out to vote for the Republicans. Obviously, we all wonder why. Did they stay home or defect to Obama? Like Ed, I suspect the former. Anecdotally, I can tell you about several conservative business people I know who decided to sit this one out. They were simply disgusted with John McCain and the party’s abandonment of conservative principles over the last seven years.
Food for thought.
