In the election of 2012, Obama won every state he won in 2008 except for Indiana and North Carolina. Thus, he won by a comfortable margin of 332 to 206 electoral votes. This, as it turns out, was exactly what I predicted in my post just before the election. There was a majority of relatively quiet Obama support that came out to vote. He won the popular vote by a margin of 4.3 million votes.
Obama’s electoral margin was so substantial that he could have lost Florida, Ohio, and Virginia and still have won the election.
On the Senate side, the Democrats were able to defend 22 out of 23 seats that were up for election while the Republicans only defended 7 of 10 of their seats. Thus, the Democrats actually gained two seats in the Senate. I was right on all the Senate races except for Montana and North Dakota where the Democrats somewhat surprisingly prevailed.
The only Republican pickup of a formerly Democratically held seat was in Nebraska, while the Democrats flipped Republican seats in Maine, Massachusetts, and Indiana. This includes the independent, Angus King, who won in Maine and who is going to caucus with the Democrats.
My prediction was off in the House races where I said the Democrats would add a net of 18 seats. However, the final total is going to be just 8. I thought the voters would turn out many of Tea Party freshmen Republicans. This was true in a couple of races with Allan West losing in Florida and Joe Walsh in Illinois. However, the Republicans held on to most of the seats they gained in 2010.
What I failed to take into account was the effect that redistricting had on the election. The huge Republican wave in 2010 put Republicans in charge of many state legislatures and governorships. In many cases, they used this political leverage to gerrymander congressional districts to their political advantage making some districts safer for Republicans and combining others districts to pit Democratic incumbents against each other.
The 2012 election was a major watershed in America and in the world story. We could just as easily be facing the prospect of 4 years of total Republican domination of all phases of government. We could have elected a socially conservative plutocrat as our leader.
Looking at the election through the lens of the 2012 narrative, the election was a decision point where the majority of American voters decided to support a relatively progressive agenda for the challenges our civilization faces in this country and the world.
At least for now, we’ve passed up the regressive alternative of trying to return to the past. We’ve got leadership in the White House and the Senate which has a much better chance to putting us in phase with the changes happening in our society than the Republican alternatives who want to roll back, deny, or resist change.
The election supports the guarded optimistic thesis I’ve put forth in my book 2012: The Real Story that Americans are in process of manifesting a net increase in their spiritual intelligence with respect to discerning what’s really important for us in these times.
Democracy survived in spite of the efforts of Republican super PACs to buy the election with the money of millionaires and billionaires.
The efforts of Republican controlled legislatures to suppress the vote of minorities through voter identification laws, fewer early voting days, greater barriers to registration, fewer polling places and voting machines in minority districts, and general election malfeasance did not work, for the most part. People were willing to wait in lines for six hours and longer to push back on this attempt to disenfranchise them.
Some of these efforts to suppress the vote of Democratic leaning constituents were blocked by the courts.
In this election, we had more trustworthy election results than what prevailed in 2000 and 2004.
As I described in my book, many things seem to come together to support a positive election result for the Democrats. Todd Aiken and Richard Mourdock self-destructed with their comments about rape. Mourdock’s comments came well after the furor over what Todd Aiken said about legitimate rape and women being able to control whether or not they get pregnant in rape. Romney never recovered from the disclosure of his disparagement of the 47% of people who don’t pay income taxes.
Moreover, the Republican were battered by hurricanes with one coming just as they were about to start their convention and another right before the election highlighting President Obama’s commander-in-chief strengths.
I don’t see these and similar Republican setbacks as a series of unfortunate events. My reading is that there is some healing intention at work trying to guide the United States and the world toward a positive outcome of the 2012 extended time frame ending in 2020.
There is a conspiracy at work here. It’s a conspiracy of higher consciousness beings trying to nudge civilization in the direction of more life affirming choices for all life on Earth.
Events, even when they are outside of our control, have the capacity to reveal the truth of which choice is better as the principles react to what has occurred. I see Hurricane Sandy as a meaningful coincidence, even if it was not influenced by anything other than nature.
If there are in fact unseen spiritual forces at work trying to shepherd humanity to a better future, there could have been no better foil for this purpose than Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate for president.
In the transitional turmoil of the extended 2012 time frame, one of the biggest challenges we face is a restructuring of our economic strategies and institutions. The blind self-interest of corporate greed and the political influence of wealth inequity threatens to destroy the ecology of our planet. There are competing narratives about how to deal with our ecological impasse as it is reflected in economic dislocation and disruption.
With Romney’s defeat and the Democratic wave in the Senate, one version of Republican economic philosophy would seem to have been discredited. Although with his many conflicting promises it was unclear exactly what Romney’s economic plan was, his selection of Paul Ryan as his vice presidential candidate was an implicit endorsement of the Ryan budget.
The basic principles of Romney/Ryan economics involve maintaining preferential tax incentives for wealthy people, rolling back government regulations on corporations, reforming entitlements, and balancing the budget through draconian cuts to social services.
What we learned from the election is that a majority of people, and especially minorities, did not buy into the fantasy that a trickle down economic approach that preserves and reinforces the present situation of wealth disparity is going to benefit them in the long run.
Romney’s presidential bid served to highlight the stark realities of a plutocratic economic agenda which is based on a premise of the moral superiority and governing legitimacy of wealthier people versus the less economically advantaged.
In his now infamous secretly recorded comments to a $50,000-a-plate donor dinner on September 17th, Romney said that the 47% of Americans who do not pay income taxes “…believe they are victims… My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
After the election in a conference call to donors, Romney removed all doubt that these were his real views when he said that the reason Obama won the election was because he gave “gifts” to minorities, single women, and young people.
What he was talking about are measures that Obama helped get through Congress that benefitted various groups. Young people had reduction of interest rates on student loans and were able to remain on their parents’ health plan until age 26. Single women had contraceptives covered under their health plan. Amnesty was extended to some children of illegal immigrants. And health care was made available to minority groups who would otherwise not be covered.
In this case and in the previous 47% remarks, we have a keyhole look into the radical honesty that occurs when plutocrats talk to what they believe to be a restricted audience of other plutocrats.
The Obama programs may look to the rest of us as being cases where the President is acting to fulfill his promise to create more economic opportunity and social justice. However, these same policies are seen by Romney as cynical political pandering to special interest groups.
Apparently Romney thinks that the less economically advantage population are character challenged and morally deficient because they vote on the basis of immediate short term tangible rewards rather than from principle. So, for example, single women aren’t voting to protect reproductive freedom, they’re just going for contraceptives.
This is a perspective which see people in the lower half of the economic spectrum as being deficient in character because they have the wrong values.
Romney not only insults the moral intelligence of the majority of voters who supported Obama but their intellectual intelligence as well. From his point of view, they failed to see through Obama’s Santa Claus scam to win the election by filling the stockings of these dependent child-like voters.
Romney was one of the wealthiest individuals ever to run for president. His campaign serves to bring to light the pernicious background assumptions of a plutocratic governing philosophy. The rich should rule because they are smarter than others and have better character and higher moral principles. That is how they got to be as wealthy and powerful as they are.
Various Republican 2016 presidential hopefuls and other figures have lost little time in distancing themselves from Mitt Romney and his offensive plutocratic sentiments. The man who only a short time ago was their greatly esteemed leader set to lead them out of the Republican nightmare of an Obama presidency is now the despised failed campaigner.
The repudiation of Romney as an individual though will not automatically lead to a fundamental reassessment of his basic economic philosophy with respect to the future direction of the party. It is too easy to claim that the 2012 presidential election disaster was a failure of the narrative rather than a repudiation of its underlying philosophy. The narrative is how the story of what the philosophy is trying to manifest is presented.
The temptation is to present a book with basically the same content but with a different cover and hope for a different result.
We can be certain that the Republican Party will attempt to redefine itself and try to come back stronger than ever in 2014 and 2016.
The Republicans are still in control of the House with 234 seats to 201 for the Democrats. And, in 2014, the Democrats have to defend 20 seats in the Senate to only 13 for the Republicans. Six of these Democrat seats are in the red states of Montana, Alaska, South Dakota, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Louisiana. Almost all of the Republican seats are in very red states where they are almost certain to win.
Moreover, in almost every previous midterm election after a president has been reelected, the party in the White House has lost seats in the House.
The strength of the Republicans in the last few years has been their ability to create a coalition of those who support social conservatism, plutocratic economics, and a libertarian focus on smaller government.
Romney as a leader of the party held this coalition together. However, with Romney’s defeat and virtual banishment, the party lacks a clear leader.
One thing is relatively clear. The Republicans will no longer be able to maintain their unified front in opposition to some sort of compromise on budget issues. They’ve kicked the can down the road until after the election with respect to various impasses on budget issues. Now, with the election settled, they will have to deal.
There has been a lot of soul-searching on the part of the Republicans trying to make sense of their presidential election debacle. In this respect, some are even looking at some of the contracts they signed. For example, some Republican legislators are recanting their pledge to not increase tax rates as embodied in Grover Norquist’s tax pledge. 95% of the Republicans in Congress had at one point signed onto this pledge.
However, it’s obvious to everyone, including a significant number of Republicans, that the budget crisis cannot be resolved without new revenues. My reading is that compromise is coming on budget issues. We’re not going to go over the so-called fiscal cliff with tax rates going up for everyone and mandated dramatic budget cuts.
Going forward there are going to significant cracks in what has heretofore been a more or less solid wall of Republican opposition to everything Obama tries to get done on basic issues. My reading is that our country is not going to be stuck in total political gridlock for the next few years.
Compromise though is tantamount to surrender to super conservatives and even with the relative lessening of influence of the Tea Party, these factions play a major role in deciding who runs for President and for House and Senate seats in the Republican Party.
Changing demographics were one of the well-documented reasons the Republicans lost the presidential election and did poorly in the Senate. Hispanics who made up 10% of the electorate in 2012 supported Obama and the Democrats by a whopping margin of 71% to 29% percent.
So, to be viable going forward in presidential politics, Republicans need to broaden their appeal to minorities and to Hispanics in particular. This clears the way for meaningful immigrant reform. My reading is that this is what we will see in 2013.
But, this will also infuriate the super conservatives of the Republican Party.
With respect to the 2016 Republican presidential field then, we will see an all-out war between the super conservatives and the more pragmatic and moderate Republicans.
My reading is that the Republicans will nominate a super conservative for President in 2016 and again lose badly.
With respect to the Republican names currently being bandied about for 2016, I don’t see any getting the nomination. It’s none of the above. Chris Christie might seem to be a strong candidate, but he’s currently morbidly obese and unlikely to lose weight in the next four years. Also, he alienated many Republicans in the last days of the election by saying positive things about how Obama handled the hurricane in his state. Elephants tend to have long memories.
Marco Rubio is another person whose name is already in consideration. He has the advantage of being young, attractive, and Hispanic. However, with respect to his qualifications to be president, Marco is more or less the Hispanic version of Sarah Palin.
The most charitable thing you can say about Mitt Romney is that he has a complex ideological character. In some respects and on some issues, he’s very conservative. On others, he appears to be moderate or even liberal. This ideological ambivalence is not lost on the Republican voters. They will want someone that stands on principle. From their point of view, Romney lost because he was not consistently conservative enough.
Paul Ryan might try to run but his economic vision has already been repudiated in the last election. I don’t see Sarah Palin running in 2016 either. She won’t want to put herself through the painful scrutiny that she has already endured in running for vice president. Mike Huckabee could be a strong candidate except that he lacks the motivation to compete.
I think we’re going to see someone like Rick Santorum or Ted Cruz winning the Republican nomination in 2016.
The Republicans have a huge challenge in reconfiguring their brand. Very conservative people don’t do well with the integration of new information. They tend to double down on what they already believe even in the face of factual evidence that flatly contradicts their beliefs.
Moreover, the majority of the American electorate is trending in the direction of being more liberal on social issues. Candidates who take a strong stand on socially conservative issues do so at their peril.
Minority voters will continue to grow as a percentage of the total electorate. To the extent to which Republicans adhere to a plutocratic economic philosophy, it’s hard to see how they are going to win over these voters whose aspirations are to achieve or maintain a good middle class lifestyle.
The Republicans are losing the demographic battle in no small part because they are out of phase with the 21st century. Younger voters, 18 to 29 years of age, being more in tune with what’s happening in our time, supported Obama and the Democrats by a 60% to 40% margin. As we go forward, the older Republican voters will be dying off and more young people will be coming of voting age.
So, I don’t see the Republicans winning the White House any time soon. Moreover, my reading is that the Democrats are going to hold on to their advantage in the Senate in 2014 and 2016. With respect to the House, I see the Democrats regaining the majority by 2016 and losing almost no seats in 2014.
What we’ve seen in the last few decades is a situation where the balance of power has swung back and forth between the two parties. However, the extended 2012 time frame introduces new dynamics never seen before. The Democrats are more in phase with the transformations happening in our civilization and so their appeal to the nonpartisan middle of the electorate is going be more compelling than would otherwise be the case.
The super conservatives are not winning and so the apocalyptic scenario of domination by a right wing authoritarian government is not in our immediate future.
Interdimensional Times 