How the MSM re-elected The Won

Bitter clingers need some explanation of what just happened. I find this as plausible as any:

The AP exit polls showed 42% were "positively influenced to vote for Obama based on his purported stellar handling of the emergency response" to SuperStorm Sandy. 

Instapundit reader Mike Harwood explains:

.... A week before the election, the in-the-tank-for-Obama MSM was deeply worried that Romney was going to beat their guy, so they played up Superstorm Sandy and the game-changing effect it was having on the election for all it was worth....

.... In Florida, with nearly 8.3 million ballots cast, the margin of victory was a mere 52,000 votes. Because this U.S. presidential election was a two person race, a takeaway by one candidate from another represents a two vote swing. Accordingly, if somewhere in the order of 26,000 Floridians, out of 8.3 million, decided that they were changing their vote from Romney to Obama based on his supposed “heckuva job” in relation to the storm response, those voters alone decided Florida’s 29 electoral votes. Given the AP exit poll and its 42% figure for those who claimed the storm influenced their decision to vote for Obama, it’s safe to say that Superstorm Sandy threw far more than 26,000 voters into Obama’s column and out of Romney’s.

The same argument can be made in Ohio. 5.3 million votes cast, margin of victory: 103,000. If the storm flipped about 52,000 votes or more from Romney to Obama, then no storm meant Ohio would have been a Romney win on election day.

In Virginia, 3.7 million votes cast, margin of victory: 107,000. If the storm influenced 54,000 voters or more to abandon Romney for Obama, the storm was decisive in converting a Romney win in Virginia to an Obama win.

In Colorado, nearly 2.4 million votes cast, margin of victory: 113,000. If 57,000 voters or more moved from the Romney camp to the Obama camp based on the storm, then Obama doesn’t win the state if the storm never happens.

A Romney win in these four states would have given him the election.

 

If you don't like that one, there are several variations of "Operation Demoralize" wherein the Obama Gubmint-Media Complex simultaneously got out their own vote and demoralized fence-sitters into staying home. Or if you understand hi-tech, there's the "unmitigated disaster known as Project ORCA."

A tiny little bright spot is that, relative to 2008, the 18-29 demographic moved ever so slightly toward Romney, not Obama.

 

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

I'm not buying the "Sandy beat Romney" thesis, Yael -- for the plain and simple reason that it contradicts everything we know about human psychology. Sure, we're all, at times, fickle and capricious, but the idea that millions of people changed their votes because of a few pictures of Obama walking the beach and a brief pep-talk by Obama in New Jersey defies belief. The fact is that most voters never heard the pep talk -- it took place in the middle of the day -- and never saw the pictures. If changing opinions were that easy, advertising would be the simplest business in the world. It's not; it's one of the most complex -- because there's still so much we don't know about how and why people DO change their opinions. I think there's a much simpler explanation of what happened Tuesday. Find out why so many white voters -- perhaps as many as 7 million, and the great majority of them probably Republicans -- didn't bother to vote -- and you'll have the answer to why Romney lost. A huge chunk of the GOP base never showed up. If it had, Romney would've won. We now know there were millions of disaffected Republicans, but we still don't know -- and may never know -- why they were so disaffected. But their "sleeping in" on Election Day is all the explanation we need for why Obama is still president.