The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
News reports from a variety of places, and my own personal report-backs from participants at yesterday’s progressive organization leaders meeting at the White House, indicate that the president is signaling loudly that he will stand strong on at least some of the very highest priority things that progressives care the most about in the fiscal showdown talks. He continues to demand that the Bush tax cuts for those making over $250,000 go up. He said yesterday in the progressives meeting that Social Security was “off the table”, and he said that while he believes there can be Medicare and Medicaid savings from a variety of administrative methods, that he had no intention of cutting benefits. We don’t know how all of this is going to end up, but right now at least, the president has decided that in unity there is strength.
This doesn’t come as a big surprise to me. In a conversation a couple of months back with a senior White House official, we were talking about the fiscal showdown politics, and I was emphasizing that there would be a serious civil war in the Democratic party if Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were cut — that our side wasn’t going to back down on this fight. His response was that the Obama team had learned from the past that the administration was in a far stronger position if they were unified with progressives, that they felt that was when they had gotten things done and had been in stronger political shape than when they had tried to triangulate things.
Now before you get too excited about that statement or take it as gospel, keep in mind something I learned early when I worked in the Clinton White House: there is no one White House political strategy or philosophy about how to do things. There are a lot of different players in a White House, and almost always several different views on how to get things done or play things out. I’m sure there are still people in that building who think it is smart politics to pick fights with the base, or who wish the “professional left” would just go away. But I do believe that there is a clear trend in the White House toward thinking it is better for Democrats to be unified in policy fights with the Republicans, simply because they keep getting rewarded politically when they are.
Look at some of the big political decisions this White House has made in the second half of the first term. When it came to prioritizing the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and endorsing marriage equality, there were advisers that argued against those actions because of how it might hurt with swing voters; same with the decision to stop deporting the DREAM Act young people. When Obama decided to put out his own deficit reduction budget proposal last fall, there were Democrats strongly urging that it include cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits as a good will gesture to the Republicans and to show the president was “centrist”; when the president was getting ready to unveil a major new jobs initiative, there were advisers, worried it would look too government-oriented, who urged it be scaled back; when the president took a turn toward middle class populism with the Osawatomie speech, Third Way Democrats cringed, and from what I hear it might have been the final nail in the coffin for Bill Daley as White House Chief of Staff, as he was uncomfortable with the approach, fearing it would drive away business support.
In all of these cases, though, the president was rewarded for these decisions. The LGBT community, after being unhappy with him earlier, rallied behind Obama with support and money more than any other president in history. Fired up by the DREAM decision, Latinos turned out in bigger numbers and voted for the president in bigger numbers than in 2008. And the president’s populist approach on economics and message paid off big time in both firing up the president’s base and winning over working class swing voters.
We don’t know how this fiscal showdown is going to play out. Progressives have to fight with all their strength against any deal, supported by the president or not, that cuts Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits and doesn’t hold the line on repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. But the president seems to be understanding more and more that in unity with his progressive base, there truly is strength.

The following e-blast is excerpted from this Democracy Corps memo.
Definitive.
Barack Obama won because he recognized a New America. The President managed only 39 percent of the white vote, the lowest white percentage recorded for a winning national candidate, and suffered a 12-point swing against him among independent voters, but won both the popular vote and an Electoral College landslide by energizing voters we describe as the Rising American Electorate. These voters–unmarried women, young people, Hispanics, and African Americans–not only delivered huge margins to the incumbent–nearly matching 2008 totals among unmarried women and African Americans, exceeding 2008 among Hispanics–but also turned out in ever greater numbers. Collectively, these voters made up nearly half (48 percent) of the 2012 electorate according to national exit poll estimates, up four points from 2008, up four points from 2008, including a 3 point increase among unmarried women.
This outcome was not inevitable. It reflects conscious and deliberate decisions by both campaigns, who made different calculations about what the 2012 electorate would ultimately look like and executed a strategy accordingly. For the first time, a national campaign ran advertising explicitly targeting unmarried women, a group who, heretofore, was too often overlooked by national candidates, despite the fact that they account for 26 percent of the voting age population. While much has been said about the gender gap in this campaign, both married men and married women voted for Romney (53 to 46 percent Romney among married women; 58 to 40 percent Romney among white married women). Barack Obama won the women’s vote and thereby won the White House by rolling up a huge margin (67 to 31 percent) among unmarried women. The marriage gap–the difference in margins between married and unmarried women–dwarfs the gender gap by 25 points (43 and 18 percent), as it has for the last three presidential elections.
Partnering with Women’s Voices, Women Vote Action Fund, Democracy Corps and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner conducted a survey of 1,001 voters in the 2012 election to explore the role of the Rising American Electorate. Read the full memo at Democracy Corps.

We Dems have had our fun blasting away at Karl Rove’s ineffectual Super-Pac ad strategy. But, here and there one sees a dicey generalization extrapolated along the lines of, “See, ads don’t matter. It’s all about ground game.”
On one level, it seems true enough for this election. There is no doubt that the Obama’s campaign’s cutting edge, soup-to-nuts GOTV operation was an instrumental, perhaps the pivotal factor in securing the margin of victory. But it would be folly to ignore the importance of ads deployed by the Obama campaign early on in defining Romney, as an out-of-touch, flip-flopping, tax-dodging errand-boy for the super rich. The impact of those early ads in the Obama campaign has been noted in articles and on political talk shows, but rarely well as Michael Hirsch puts it in his National Journal article “Mitt Romney Had Every Chance to Win–But He Blew It“:

For all of the fretting about how $5 billion in campaign spending left the nation with something close to the status quo ante–a Democratic president and Senate, a GOP House–perhaps the most successful chunk of advertising money ever spent in modern American political history was the initial $50 million or so the Obama team devoted last spring to defining Romney as an exploitative, job-exporting Wall Street plutocrat.
In a dynamic that played out much like 2004, when Democratic challenger John Kerry failed to respond to the Republicans’ “Swift Boat” attacks, Romney never responded effectively to the fat-cat charges. And he never overcame that image, as a blanket of Obama ads kept up the attack through Nov. 6 in the battleground states. “I think they were very smart in defining him early. The early ads paid off,” says GOP strategist Rick Tyler, who helped Newt Gingrich defeat Romney in the South Carolina primary by portraying him similarly. “I don’t think he ever really recovered.”

In addition to the early ad campaign another Obama ad called “Stage” has been cited as a powerful attitude changer, most recently on MSNBC’s ‘Hardball’ program:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Jane Mayer has an article about the ad in the current issue of the New Yorker (subscriber only link). But she had this to say about the low-budget ad on Chris Matthew’s Hardball show:

…They did some internal studies that showed that the trustworthiness of Romney was 11 points behind that of Obama in places where the ad was shown. In places where it didn’t show, he was just 5 points behind…It made people who watched it think he was profiting from laying people off and breaking promises to fund peoples’ pensions and health care plans…It was a killer ad.

Not surprisingly, one of the makers of the low-budget ad was an ardent fan of the late Frank Capra, who was a wizard at depicting stories of working people overcoming corporate greed. It is a powerful ad, and it may be that forcing the workers to build the stage for announcing their firings was especially galling in its unbridled, sadistic, in-your-face arrogance. Perhaps the take-away is that early ads that define the adversary’s character defects effectively do matter, and really great ads work anytime. The rest…maybe not so much.
It would be Capra-esque, karmic justice if Mike Earnest (yes, really), the worker who lost his job to the Romnoids in the ad, not only put an end to Romney’s political ambitions, but also saved America from a hideous right turn with his heartfelt account.

In every presidential election, many different causes are cited as tipping the scale in one direction or the other. There is certainly no shortage of reasons for President Obama’s re-election being bandied about.
One of the more interesting notions that has popped up in election post-mortems is that better-than-usual coverage of GOP-driven voter suppression was instrumental in energizing African and Latino Americans, and to some extent, even white moderates, as well as progressives. There are some interesting statistics to support the argument, although available data is not conclusive. For example, in “How the GOP’s War on Voting Backfired ,” The Nation’s Ari Berman explains,

Take a look at Ohio, where Ohio Republicans limited early voting hours as a way to decrease the African-American vote, which made up a majority of early voters in cities like Cleveland and Dayton. Early voting did fall relative to 2008 as a result of Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s cutbacks in early voting days and hours, but the overall share of the black electorate increased from 11 percent in 2008 to 15 percent in 2012. More than anything else, that explains why Barack Obama once again carried the state…According to CBS News: “More African-Americans voted in Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida than in 2008.”
The same thing happened with the Latino vote, which increased as a share of the electorate (from 9 percent in 2008 to 10 percent in 2012) and broke even stronger for Obama than in 2008 (from 67-31 in 2008 to 71-27 in 2012, according to CNN exit polling). The share of the Latino vote increased in swing states like Nevada (up 4 percent), Florida (up 3 percent) and Colorado (up 1 percent). Increased turnout and increased support for Obama among Latinos exceeded the margin of victory for the president in these three swing states.
We’re still waiting on the data to confirm this theory, but a backlash against voter suppression laws could help explain why minority voter turnout increased in 2012. “That’s an extremely reasonable theory to be operating from,” says Matt Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decisions, a Latino-focused polling and research firm. “There were huge organizing efforts in the black, Hispanic and Asian community, more than there would’ve been, as a direct result of the voter suppression efforts.” Groups like the NAACP, National Council of La Raza, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, and the Asian-American Legal Defense Fund worked overtime to make sure their constituencies knew their voting rights.
…Racial minorities made up 28 percent of the electorate in 2012, up from 26 percent in 2008, and voted 80 percent for Obama. “Romney matched the best performance among white voters ever for a Republican challenger–and yet he lost decisively in the Electoral College,” wrote Ron Brownstein of National Journal. Minorities also accounted for 45 percent of Obama’s total vote. That means that in the not-so-distant-future, a Democrat will be able to win the presidency without needing a majority of white votes in his or her own coalition. In a country with growing diversity, if one party is committed to expanding the right to vote and the other party is committed to restricting the right to vote, it’s not hard to figure out which one will ultimately be more successful.

Of course the reason for the increase in the share of the electorate held by people of color could be that lots of white voters did not cast ballots on election day because they liked neither Romney or Obama. We will need the final white turnout as a percentage of the eligible white voter figures, and then compare them to ’08 to make a credible guestimate.
Joy-Anne Reid adds at The Griot:

Florida’s reduced early voting period actually galvanized black churches, who took full advantage of the one remaining Sunday to conduct a two-day “souls to the polls” marathon. And even as Election Day turned into a late Election Night, and with the race in Ohio, and thus for the 270 votes needed to win the presidency, called by 11 p.m., black voters remained in line in Miami-Dade and Broward, two heavily Democratic counties in Florida, where black voters broke turnout records even compared to 2008…
“Republicans thought that they could suppress the vote, but these efforts actually motivated people to get registered and cast a ballot,” Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner said. “It’s no surprise that the communities targeted by these policies came out to the polls in a big way–they saw this not just as an affront to their rights, but as a call to action.”
“From the tours we did in 22 states, it became clear to us that many blacks that were apathetic and indifferent became outraged and energized when they realized that [Republicans] were changing the rules in the middle of the game, in terms of voter ID laws, ending ‘souls to the polls,'” said Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, who also hosts MSNBC’s Politics Nation. “So what was just another election, even though it dealt with the re-election of the first black president, took on a new dimension when they realized that they were implementing the disenfranchisement of black voters.”

Read more…

Nate Silver explains a much discussed topic, “Which Polls Fared Best (and Worst) in the 2012 Presidential Race”
At the Tampa Bay Times, Mary Ellen Klas addresses a question on the minds of many in FL and elsewhere, “Could Democrats tap Charlie Crist to unseat Gov. Rick Scott in 2014?” It’s not only Scott’s status as poster-boy for voter suppression and blame for long lines at Florida polls. It’s also “The decision to cancel the high speed rail: “$2.4 billion, tens of thousands of jobs in a struggling economy;” The governor’s failure to accept federal stimulus money: “we are a donor state; it was morally right to take that money;” The pending standoff over health care reform: “defies common sense.”
To get a sense of the importance of gerrymandering in the Republicans’ maintaining their House of Reps majority, note that Democratic House candidates got more popular votes than their Republican opponents, according to Aaron Blake at The Fix.
Also at The Fix, Chris Cillizza and Jon Cohen have some interesting stats about Obama and white voters: Obama’s 39 percent showing among white voters matched the percentage that Bill Clinton received in 1992 — albeit it in a competitive three-way race — and exceeded the percentage of the white vote earned by Walter Mondale in 1984, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George McGovern in 1972….In fact, the white vote as a percentage of the overall electorate has declined in every election since 1992.
Alan Fram has a good update at HuffPo on prospects for filibuster reform.
Despite the Republicans’ thinly-veiled meme that President Obama’s campaign dissed whites, WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. makes the point that Obama’s victory coalition was a model of diversity: “Yes, he won African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans overwhelmingly. But the exit poll also shows that 32 percent of Obama’s voters were white women and 24 percent of them were white men, while 23 percent were African-American men and women, and 14 percent were Latinos. This is a genuinely diverse alliance. ”
Much buzz about the epic failure of Romney’s ‘Project Orca’ voter monitoring and GOTV app.
Krugman makes a solid case for ignoring, no, booting the ‘deficit scolds.’ It’s like this: “…deficits are actually a good thing when the economy is deeply depressed, so deficit reduction should wait until the economy is stronger. As John Maynard Keynes said three-quarters of a century ago, “The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity…the deficit scolds, while posing as the nation’s noble fiscal defenders, have in practice shown themselves both hypocritical and incoherent. They don’t deserve to have a central role in policy discussion; they really don’t even deserve a seat at the table. And they certainly don’t deserve to have one of their own appointed as Treasury secretary. ”
As much as we enjoy watching Karl Rove hem, haw and squirm about the hundreds of millions of dollars squandered on Romney and failed senatorial candidates, Chris Kromm’s “Did Big Money really lose this election? Hardly” at Facing South makes the sobering point that big money was quite effective further down-ballot.
For a final schadenfreude wallow before you get to work building the future, check out Lauren Kelley’s Alternet post, “5 Very Bad Things That Happened to Karl Rove in Just 2 Days.”

We know you’re sick of politics and you would like to give it a rest for a while. But Michael Tomasky’s post, “The Obama Coalition in the Off Years” at The Daily Beast has one of the best ideas yet for the mid-term elections, and you should check it out before it fades off the political radar screen. Noting that 2012 voter turnout was near 60 percent, Tomasky explains:

Some rich liberals need to fund a public-education group that will work full-time to make sure the liberal blocs and constituencies come out and vote in off-year elections…And off-year turnout is down around 40 percent. The 20 percent who leave the system are almost entirely Democrats. This has been true all my life. It’s basically because old people always vote, and I guess old white people vote more than other old people, and old white people tend to be Republican. So even when white American isn’t enraged as it was in 2010, midterms often benefit Republicans.

Conceding the exceptions of ’98 and ’06, Tomasky continues,

As long as this is true, the country’s progressive coalition will spend forever taking one step forward in presidential years, and one step back in off years. But imagine if the Obama coalition had voted, even in decent numbers, in 2010. The Democrats might still well have the House.
If liberal blocs can be conditioned in a generation’s time to vote in every federal election, well, combine that with what we know to be the coming demographic changes, and the electoral pressure on Republicans would be constant and enormous. The Republican white voting pool has limits, so the GOP would have to compete even harder for brown and black votes, which would pull our politics even more to the left.
A long-term project along these lines would be $20 million (or whatever) very well spent for some rich liberal who cares about changing the country.

Tomasky’s idea has added appeal, considering that in 2014 an unusually high number of Democratic senators will be up for re-election in red and swing states (6 for each). As for the House, Cameron Joseph notes at The Hill:

On the House side, while Democrats will have some opportunities at districts they missed out on in California and elsewhere, heavily gerrymandered GOP maps in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin and North Carolina will continue to limit their opportunities.
Democrats tend to live in more urban areas, concentrating their votes into fewer congressional districts, and legally required “majority-minority” districts further pack Democrats into a few districts and make nearby districts more safely Republican.
According to a recent study by the Center for Voting and Democracy, Democrats start off with 166 safe districts while Republicans start off with 195. There are only 74 true swing districts where the presidential candidates won between 46 and 54 percent of the popular vote, down from 89 before redistricting.
That means the GOP needs to win less than one-third of competitive House seats to stay in control — something that shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish, barring a huge Democratic wave. In a politically neutral year Democrats are likely to have around 203 seats, a number that’s only slightly higher than the number they’ll have once the remaining 2012 races are called.

In addition, it’s just possible that some of the creative GOTV techniques Dems deployed so successfully this year could be transferable to the 2014 mid-terms. In any case, meeting the challenge of making the next mid-term electorate resemble this year’s general election demographics could help insure that progressive change replaces continued gridlock and stagnation.

The following article is cross-posted from a Democracy Corps Public Campaign Fund e-blast:
In 2012, election spending went through the roof. More than $6 billion were spent at the federal level, with Super PACs pouring in more than a billion in outside spending. A post-election survey conducted November 6-7, 2012 by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Public Campaign Action Fund shows that voters are fed up with a system that they believe undermines democracy.
We will release a full report on voters’ attitudes toward money in politics and the policies they overwhelmingly support to change the current system, but we want to immediately release some of the dramatic highlights from what voters told us on Election Day 2012.
In an otherwise intensely partisan and divided electorate, concerns about money in politics unite voters across parties and demographic groups. Democrats and Republicans give nearly identically negative ratings to lobbyists and are equally concerned about the level of spending in this year’s presidential campaign.
Seven in ten said there was more advertising in this election compared to past years and more than a quarter characterized it as “unhealthy for our democracy.”
Two thirds (64 percent) of 2012 voters said that democracy was undermined in this election by big donors and secret money that control which candidates we hear about. Accordingly, more than three quarters (78 percent) say there is too much money spent on campaigns and there need to be reasonable limits.
Lobbyists and Super PACs are, not surprisingly, overwhelmingly hated by American voters. And on our thermometer scale, 61 percent give the current level of money in politics an unfavorable rating.
Even as they went to the polls to vote for their representatives in Congress, just 15 percent of voters said the views of their constituents have the most influence on how members of Congress vote–compared to 59 percent who said “special interest groups and lobbyists” and 46 percent who believe campaign contributors have the most influence on members’ votes.
Join Stanley Greenberg, CEO of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and Co-Founder, Democracy Corps, and David Donnelly, Executive Director of Public Campaign Action Fund on Tuesday for an in-depth look at these important findings.
When:
Tuesday, November 13, 2012, at 11am EDT
Call-In Details
Audio: 888.647.2706
Online Presentation:
1. When it’s time for the meeting, visit this link: https://gqrr.webex.com/gqrr/j.php?ED=160440867&UID=480457007&PW=NNTYwNDJmM2Uw&RT=MiMxMQ%3D%3D
2. Enter your name and email address.
3. Enter the meeting password: gqrr.
4. Click JOIN NOW.
5. Follow the instructions that appear on your screen

In his Washington post column today, Charles Krauthhammer comes out swinging at the Nervous Nellies in the GOP:

[Republicans] lose and immediately the chorus begins. Republicans must change or die. A rump party of white America, it must adapt to evolving demographics or forever be the minority…

Fiddlesticks, says the big K:

The country doesn’t need two liberal parties. Yes, Republicans need to weed out candidates who talk like morons about rape. But this doesn’t mean the country needs two pro-choice parties either. In fact, more women are pro-life than are pro-choice. The problem here for Republicans is not policy but delicacy — speaking about culturally sensitive and philosophically complex issues with reflection and prudence.

Right on, Charlie baby. You rule, dude. You go on telling the GOP that they should hang in there and stick with all their extreme and unpopular positions — that they just need to learn how to mumble a little bit more when they get to the naughty bits. After all, you conservative guys know much better than us liberals about how it is that them thar little women really don’t really want to worry their pretty little heads much about “philosophically complex issues” like “no exceptions for rape” – stuff that men understand much better than they do anyway. Republicans just need a couple of etiquette lessons to learn how to stop sounding like they’re a bunch of drunk aluminum siding salesmen swapping locker room jokes while they try to grope the waitresses in a third-rate topless bar.
(Now it is true that on the particular issue of appealing to Latinos Charlie the K actually does recommend a full scale, if clinically delusional, pander – a surreal Hunter Thompson-on-acid policy mix of total amnesty, napalm strikes and land mines on the Mexican border and Marco Rubio giving misty-eyed orations about the American dream. But never mind about that. Otherwise he’s absolutely implacable. No compromise, no surrender.)
Here he goes:

…The doomsayers warn, Republicans must change not just ethnically but ideologically. Back to the center. Moderation above all!
More nonsense. Tuesday’s exit polls showed that by an eight-point margin (51-43), Americans believe that government does too much. And Republicans are the party of smaller government. Moreover, onrushing economic exigencies — crushing debt, unsustainable entitlements — will make the argument for smaller government increasingly unassailable.
So, why give it up? Republicans lost the election not because they advanced a bad argument but because they advanced a good argument not well enough. Romney ran a solid campaign, but he is by nature a Northeastern moderate. He sincerely adopted the new conservatism but still spoke it as a second language….. Romney is a good man who made the best argument he could, and nearly won. He would have made a superb chief executive, but he (like the Clinton machine) could not match Barack Obama in the darker arts of public persuasion.

Yes. Yes. Finally. Someone with the guts to stand up and tell the truth about the role of the dark arts in Obama’s campaign — that the real reason Obama won was because he was trained in secret Jedi techniques of mass hypnotism by Indonesian/Kenyan witch doctors or something like that. I mean jeeze, didn’t anyone else notice the “these are not the droids you’re looking for” hand gestures Obama was making at the camera during the second debate?
Here’s the Big K’s finale:

The answer to Romney’s failure is not retreat, not aping the Democrats’ patchwork pandering. It is to make the case for restrained, rationalized and reformed government in stark contradistinction to Obama’s increasingly unsustainable big-spending, big-government paternalism.
Republicans: No whimpering. No whining. No reinvention when none is needed. Do conservatism but do it better. There’s a whole generation of leaders ready to do just that

Damn, what a refreshing breath of fresh air. Just when I was starting to worry that Republicans might actually learn from their mistakes and present a more formidable challenge next time, The big K rolls into town to reassure me that there are plenty of people in the Republican coalition who will keep them firmly on the path to sustained electoral failure.
You hang in there, Big K man, you keep right on trucking. Trust me, bro’, I got your back.

Democracy Corps, along with partners at Campaign for America’s Future and Women’s Voices. Women Vote Action Fund, conducted election night and day-after interviews among those who voted this week to probe attitudes about why they made the choices they made in this election, what they expect of their leaders, and what their priorities are for the period ahead.
The most important issue is that this election was a battle for the middle class. Both candidates wanted to make the future of the middle class a central part of their campaigns. In the convention and the final weeks of the campaign, Obama turned to a narrative about the future of the middle class and it made him much stronger electorally. Romney began talking about the middle class in a serious way, particularly in the first debate, and made it his closing argument. So that’s where the battle was.
Republicans could not win the battle for the future of the middle class. Republicans have a major brand problem that they will need to address if they are to win future elections. It’s pretty clear that to most voters, what defines the Republican Party and Mitt Romney is that they are totally for the rich and out of touch with average people, which is key when you have an election about the middle class.
Our survey data shows that Obama had a 9-point advantage over Mitt Romney on which candidate would do a better job at restoring the middle class, which is 3 times that of his advantage in the election. That’s what gave him his ability to get a vote majority. This was also an election about Medicare, and the President ended up with an 11-point advantage on Medicare.
If this was an election about the middle class, what moved the agenda moving forward? The starting point was creating jobs and getting the economy going. Half of all voters said that the most important thing leaders should focus on was jobs and the economy. The next top two priorities, relatively even at 40 percent, were reducing the deficit and protecting middle class retirement benefits like Medicare and Social Security. The most important piece here is that the top priority is not the deficit. It’s creating jobs. By more than a 2-to-1 margin, voters said that the biggest priority after the election is to work to grow the economy rather than work to reduce the deficit.
And when we asked voters the reasons why they voted for Obama, the most important reasons were his economic actions–that he brought us through economic crisis, his jobs plan, and commitment to social insurance–the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, and Social Security. But above all, jobs and the economy for the middle class. Conversely, Mitt Romney lost because he was not a believable caretaker of the future of the middle class. The strongest theme in voters’ reasons to vote against Romney all centered on the fact that he was out of touch with ordinary people and for the rich–because of his comment about the “47 percent,” corporate policies, and support for more tax cuts for the wealthy.
It is not surprising that these economic concerns were front and center for the Rising American Electorate of unmarried women, young people, and minorities, which grew as proportion of the population in this election, and grew as base voters for Obama. They now form almost half the electorate, and that’s why Obama was able to win. For those voters, the two top issues by far in terms of advancing middle class was creating jobs and protecting retirement benefits. For those who gave this election to the president, it’s clear what their priorities are–on restoring the middle class.
Barack Obama won because he recognized this New America of unmarried women, minorities, and young people. The President managed just 39 percent of the white vote in a tough economy, but won both the popular vote and an Electoral College landslide by energizing voters we describe as the Rising American Electorate. These voters–unmarried women, young people, Hispanics and African Americans — not only delivered huge margins to the incumbent–nearly matching 2008 totals among unmarried women and African Americans, exceeding 2008 among Hispanics–but also turned out in ever greater numbers. Collectively, these voters made up nearly half (48 percent) of the 2012 electorate according to national exit poll estimates, up four points from 2008 and with the biggest gain coming among unmarried.
This outcome was not inevitable. It reflects deliberative decisions by both campaigns, who made different calculations about what the 2012 electorate would ultimate look like and executed a strategy accordingly. For the first time, a national campaign ran advertising explicitly targeting unmarried women, a group who, heretofore, was too often overlooked by national candidates, despite the fact that they account for 26 percent of the voting age population. While much has been said about the gender gap in this campaign, both married men and married women voted for Romney (53 to 46 percent Romney among married women; 58 to 40 percent Romney among white married women). Barack Obama won the women’s vote and thereby won the White House by rolling up a huge margin (67 to 31 percent) among unmarried women. The marriage gap–the difference in margins between married and unmarried women–dwarfs the marriage gap by 25 points (43 and 18 percent), as it has for the last three presidential elections.
More information, including frequency questionnaire and graphs, can be found here:
http://www.democracycorps.com/National-Surveys/post-election-the-real-mandate/
Graphs:
http://www.democracycorps.com/attachments/article/926/WVWV%20post-elect%20(draft6).pdf
http://ourfuture.org/electionpoll2012
http://www.democracycorps.com/In-the-News/how-unmarried-women-youth-and-people-of-color-defined-this-election/

This item by TDS Founding Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The “Obama coalition” is real–though it is more narrow than once was thought. Young adults, minorities, women (especially unmarried women), and voters from lower-income households turned out in large numbers. Defying expectations (including mine), the young adult share of the electorate expanded slightly over its showing in 2008.Meanwhile, the president’s share of the white vote was down from 43 to 39 percent. He was supported by 56 percent of moderates, down from 60 percent, and by 45 percent of Independents, down from 52 percent. And while the president’s share of the vote from households making $50 thousand or less held steady at 60 percent, his support among middle income households ($50 to 100 thousand) fell from 49 to 46 percent, and among households making more than $100 thousand, from 49 to 44 percent.
America’s demographic shift grinds on inexorably. The white share of the electorate fell from 74 percent in 2008 to 72 percent in 2012. This was at the low end of expectations, but in line with the assumption that guided the Obama campaign. Meanwhile, Latinos maintained, or perhaps even expanded from 9 to 10 percent, their share of the electorate. They supported Obama by an overwhelming 71 to 27 percent. If the national Republican Party does not reconsider its stance on immigration policy, it risks the fate of the California Republican Party after Pete Wilson’s governorship–permanent minority status.
Social issues advantage the left, not right. Americans are perfectly willing to be represented by conservatives, but they draw the line at attitudes they consider far outside the mainstream. Romney may well have lost the general election the day he decided to go to Rick Perry’s right on immigration policy. And there’s no way that Republicans should have lost the Senate races in Missouri and Indiana, but their candidates found a way–by wrecking their campaigns on the shoals of abortion politics.
Moreover, the mainstream is shifting. Referenda last night broke the streak of 33 consecutive defeats for same-sex marriage in statewide votes. Obama’s support for marriage equality appears to have cost him little, even among the working class voters who were disposed to support him on economic grounds.
Transactional politics works. Ohio workers in automobile-related companies were grateful to the president. So were Latinos (for the executive order protecting younger immigrants), gays and lesbians (for the president and vice-president’s support for same-sex marriage), and younger women (for reproductive health services and pay equity). In the fall of 2011, the Obama campaign decided that running for reelection on the basis of general achievements–the stimulus, the Affordable Care Act, financial reform, etc.–would not suffice to re-mobilize a dispirited Democratic base, and they decided to mount a much more targeted effort. While we’ll never know for sure, the results seem to vindicate their approach.
Mea culpa. I did not believe that Obama could be reelected on this basis. I did not believe that a campaign that seemed likely to reduce his share of whites, middle class voters, moderates, and independents–and did so–could obtain a majority. I was wrong.
I remain to be convinced, however, that Obama’s tactics provided the strongest foundation for the policies he seeks to enact. Divided government can yield only two results–compromise or gridlock. The tone and temper of this campaign have not advanced the prospects of agreement across party lines. So gridlock continues to loom–unless the Republicans have been chastened by defeat, as the president hopes. But Speaker Boehner sounds anything but chastened, House Republicans are homogeneously conservative, and it will be much harder for Obama to divide House Republicans than it was for Ronald Reagan to snatch away moderate and conservative House Democrats thirty years ago.
So it’s still an open question whether Obama can transform his new electoral majority into a governing majority, as Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s. Obama’s campaign was undoubtedly a brilliant tactical success against considerable odds and historians may judge that there was no alternative. But transforming it into a strategic success will be much harder.