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The Expansionist
Sunday, November 25, 2012
 
Popular Vote 2012
Nobody in the online news stories I have seen actually did the subtraction to show us how many more individuals voted for President Obama than for Richie Rich. Why the hell not? Why do we have to pull up a calculator to get that number? Sometimes the stupidity of the human race just astonishes me. Why is it that the people who went to the trouble to say, on November 9th, that Obama got 60,782,354 to Romney’s 57,884,882, and even specified, on November 7th what percentages the popular-vote figures amounted to ("61,173,739 or 50.5% to 58,167,260 or 48.0%"), not do the math? I couldn't even find an actual final tally in early results from a Google search, just one that was given "with nearly all votes in", on November 9th. Why not?
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As you can see, the figures above differ by hundreds of thousands of votes (391,385 in the case of votes for Obama; 282,378 in the case of votes for Romney, for a total discrepancy of 673,763 popular votes between two reports). What is this? — a Third World country?
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A Bing search brought up a Wikipedia page as the top result (a page that Google did not show in the first 30 results — which is inexcusably atrocious). Wiki gave the popular vote as 64,497,901 for Obama to 60,298,327 for Romney, reported as 50.8% to 47.5%. But there, too, no one thought to give an actual number for the difference in popular vote: 4,199,574. Did the editors think no one wanted to know that? Or was every single reader to do subtraction, in their head, of two 7-digit numbers? or pull out a calculator? or call up a calculator on their computer?
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Wikipedia didn't even do the subtraction of the percentages: 3.3%. That was a lot easier to do in one's head, but not everybody can do even simple arithmetic easily, and some don't even try, even tho they'd be glad to have the information if they didn't have to do math.
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Wikipedia also didn't do the addition, to show the total popular vote: 124,796,228. Again, why not?
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What is wrong with these reporters and editors? Are they just insufficiently curious, or out of touch with the things that matter to ordinary human beings?
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The bulk of people who followed election results on November 6th and followed up November 7th thought the difference in popular vote was on the order of 2 million, not over 4 million. They even remember the percentage difference as just barely 2%, rather than over 3%. Does it make a difference? Hell yes! The militant Radical Right sees a defeat by 2 million votes as a 'squeaker' that justifies them in their insane fantasy that they 'just barely lost', and that that loss was due to their not being Conservative ENUF! They cannot do that with a difference of 4 million.
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I saw one reader-comment at the end of an online news story today, 19 days after the election, that said that Romney lost because 3.5 million Republicans stayed home. But that's wrong. He would STILL have lost if all those asserted stay-at-homes had voted! And that makes a big difference.
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The Radical Right cannot take any comfort from the participation rate ("turnout") as reported by Wikipedia: "57.5%–60% (voting eligible)". The Radical Right did everything in their power to rally their voters, in an enormous effort that cost over $750 million (Dems spent over $850 million) and still lost, even tho at least 40% of voters stayed home. There is very good reason to believe that the great majority of nonvoters were members of groups (the poor, the disillusioned, the dispirited) that would vote Democratic if we had mandatory voting.
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If 125 million people represents 60% of the eligible electorate, that means there are 83 million people who did not vote. If 2/3 of them (which seems to me a conservative figure) would vote Democratic, that would mean another 55.8 million for the Democratic candidate but only 27.2 million for the Republican, which is more indicative of the actual political disposition of the People. 55.8M – 27.2M = 28.6M, + 4.2M actual popular-vote advantage would equal a 32.8 million popular-vote advantage for the Democrat if everyone voted. No Radical Rightist could pretend to see THAT big a discrepancy as a 'squeaker', nor pretend anything but that the Nation repudiates their politics of racism, sexism, religious bigotry, economic division, and scapegoating.
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Alas, we do not yet have compulsory voting, tho we assuredly should have, but even with 40% of eligible voters staying home, Republicans lost by over 4 million votes.
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Plainly, if Republicans continue their present course of antagonizing the bulk of Americans, the only way they can possibly elect another President is if they can find some way to suppress the Democratic vote, by MILLIONS.
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So, what do you think Republicans (or "Tepublicans", if we regard the Republican Party of today as captive to its "Tea Party" loons) will do: moderate their stances, or work very, very hard to suppress millions of Democratic votes?





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