Romney had ORCA, which flopped. Obama had “the Optimizer.” “The Optimizer” may have been a key to Obama’s win.
In essence, said Larry Grisolano, who helped lead the development of the system, it created a new set of ratings based on the political leanings of categories of people the Obama campaign was interested in reaching, allowing the campaign to buy its advertising on political terms as opposed to traditional television industry terms.
“We were able to create a set of ratings based on a model of our target voters, as opposed to the broader categories that are kind of defined by traditional advertising ratings,” he said.
Erik Smith, another senior strategist, said a decision by “super PACS” supporting Mr. Romney to hold off on their first major anti-Obama advertising push until well after the primaries had given the team extra time to develop its system.
Through its vast array of information collected via its e-mail list, Facebook and millions of door-to-door discussions conducted by volunteers in swing states — and fed into the campaign database — the campaign devised a ranking scale for voters ranging from likeliest to support Mr. Obama to least likely.
Then the advertising team worked backward to figure out what sorts of programs likely and undecided voters were liable to watch, and when. It did so using not only traditional Nielsen Media Research data but also newly available information from set-top cable boxes that gave a far more detailed sense of how the groups watched television, and, more important, commercials.
The answers led to advertising purchases that the campaign might not have made, especially as it pursued undecided voters who did not regularly go to traditional sources for news.
So it was, said Jim Margolis, a senior advertising strategist, that the campaign bought more late-night advertising time than it otherwise would have on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” ESPN and, most surprisingly, TV Land, the basic cable network devoted to reruns of old programs.
In the case of TV Land, Mr. Margolis said, the campaign was seeking to reach “folks who may not be as political, may not be deciding until later.”
“A lot of these people are lower-information voters,” he said, “not necessarily tuned to politics and watching a little more programming that is out of the main lane of what most of us think of.”
Read the rest. I’ve written several posts on the demographic and cultural shifts that surely fed Obama’s voter turnout, and I’ve also written on the possibility that he and his allies cheated. I’m not discounting any of that. But none of them by themselves explain why Obama’s base could be so dispirited yet still end up handing him another term. Obama had to find a way to bring new voters in to replace defectors, along with the other factors that ended up helping him. The trick was, he had to find voters who don’t know much about what’s going on in the world.
All together, though, it looks more and more like Obama won a tactical rather than demographic or broader strategic victory. He and Axelrod had four years to build out their plans and machines. Each little piece — the Optimizer, the Voter Participation Center, the Obama Phones, outright cheating, plus efforts to depress Romney’s vote — played its part.
What I’m saying is, Barack Obama and David Axelrod found a way to hack the election. Not literally, not hacking electronic voting machines or anything like that. They found every weakness in the system and their opponent and exploited them all. They bought votes where they could, they scrounged for new votes where they found them, they overwhelmed voter registrars with garbage registrations to slip some fraudulent votes in, etc. They didn’t win any one way so much as they won by pulling every move they could think of. They also fought countermeasures that might have defeated them, such as voter ID.
They hacked their way back into power, and will use another weakness in the system — Harry Reid’s apathy toward keeping the Senate a strong constitutional body — to hack their way into more power.
Yes, but they mostly targeted the extremely low information voter with lies.
Tactically it was well done. Morally it is a cesspool.
A Canadian Prime Minister once said he didn’t care what the top 15 or 20 percent said or thought, they don’t elect me, it’s the other 80%. Watching some of the Dem’s ads brought this to mind in their appeal to the low end of the spectrum. Specifically it was one of Obama’s comments and the cheer in the bar, after one of my Grand son’s hockey games, about bayonets that brought this to mind. All that said to me was appeal to the masses of asses and the Dem’s definitely have the upper hand there.
As I have always maintained, the only difference between an intellectual and an illiterate is common sense and experience.
I would strongly dispute your faith in the common sense of most intellectuals.
Sorry SB but that has been the case time after time, idiots under the cover of academia.
That’s a hell of a good bon-mot, but…
Which is the one with the common sense and experience, if you wouldn’t mind enlightening me.
In my experience the difference between an intellectual and an imbecile is two syllables and popularity.
Who cares? The most important thing is to win. It’s time for conservatives to stop thinking that somehow politics is about playing nice and being noble. That’s for losers.
“Nice guys finish last”, said Leo Durocher. He was right back then and is still right. Romney and the GOP never took off their gloves, afraid of being characterized as racists. They fell for that phony characterization. They played patty cake with Obama and you know the rest of the story.
you are so spot on ToledoJim. 100% spot on.
Leaving aside the various forays into fraud, which it appears the Republicans (with the exception of Allen West) are prepared to let slide, it appears that Obama’s campaign people took to heart the words of former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson.
When he ran for president, Stevenson was told, “All the intelligent people are with you, Governor.” Stevenson, famously, replied, “That’s not enough; I need a majority.”
There are a lot more stupid and/or uninformed people than there are intelligent and/or informed people, and the latter votes count as much as the former. Axelrod and his cohorts realized this early on, and planned accordingly. Romney, who never undertook to explain that “letting the auto industry go bankrupt” did not mean letting it vanish, but forcing it to restructure—and, worse, never explained that the Obama-run bankruptcy of the auto industry abrogated the bankruptcy laws and stiffed the preferred creditors—never seemed to figure this out.
It helps the other side that their narrative is a children’s story. Onoses! They’re gonna cook Big Bird for Thanksgiving!
Yes, that helps. But an intelligent campaign would have recognized that the message needed to be told as a “children’s story,” and devoted a great deal of energy to doing so.
What I’m saying is that their narrative is inherently a children’s story. You’ll never explain to a 4-year old about the GM bankruptcy, and why a standard bankruptcy would have been better. The big bad Romney monster is something they can comprehend. The business about who takes a haircut in bankruptcy court isn’t. And these “low information voters” are at about the mental level of 4-year olds.
Maybe the GOP needs to just start making snot up like the donkeys do. That might work. Something like “the big bad donkey wants to rape you in the poo poo hole”. They may be able to grasp that.
No “narrative” can help the Republicans, who are just happy as clams to be the skins to the Marxists shirts.
If there was an answer, which there isn’t, the answer would be a completly new political party. But there isn’t time. The people who said that if the criminals won again, it would be over, were right. They won, and it’s over.
The problem is that the Republicans have screwed it up to the point that there is no hope. There isn’t time left.
Anybody with a brain is concentrating on making sure that his own little pot is protected and making sure that sight lines on the exits are maintained. That includes moving any money you have to the safest locations. For example, they will be coming for your IRAs soon. Frankly, any money in electronic form is at severe risk. It includes eliminating debt, particularly shelter debt. It includes looking for another location to live, if you can, in another country that hasn’t made it crystal clear that what you earned, they will take. There aren’t many who will, and fewer with the ability to flee, but if you can, you should. It includes learning how to squeeze the system for every drop you can while you are here, because every drop you don’t take, they will take times ten. It includes making sure your children have a skill that can help them survive in any economy; fixing cars, building shelters, growing food, fighting skills, etc. It includes being armed, lethally and in abundance.
Rome collapsed over centuries. Everything is speeded up at least by a factor of ten in this world.
obamacare’s tenacles insure that freedom is a thing of the past. It can’t be undone, and it will destroy the country. Destroying the country is the reason it exists.
It is a scene played out in supermarkets across the country every day. A kid with his mom spies candy at the checkout. He demands some. To make the kid happy the Mom buys it even if she can’t afford the extra expense. If Mom says “Sorry sweetie, it is not in our food budget” we all know what happens.
Cartoon politics for a cartoon nation.
Okay.
I can get behind that.
Holy Christ! We may just be able to find jobs for all those unemployed Puppetry Majors living in tents and banging drums on Wall Street!
It’s too late even for that. We not only have an obviously stolen election, but we also have a voting infrastructure that allows future elections to be stolen at will.
Until we can go back to paper ballots, purple fingers, and picture IDs, we no longer have a republic, and it no longer matters whether we can educate or persuade our fellow citizens.
Until that time you and I have these three options – and ONLY these options:
1) Join a secessionist movement in a conservative state, hope enough people are like-minded enough to make it happen, and hope the federal grabberment has too few resources to force all the disaffected states back in line all at once.
2) Stockpile food, water, fuel, and huge amounts of ammo, and hope you can ride it out through the inevitable collapse and the slow process of rebuilding that you HOPE will happen afterward.
3) Emigrate.
So why are the GOP such a bunch of boobs? And I don’t mean the good, fun kind of boob.
Because both the 2008 and 2012 GOP primaries were hacked in much the same way that the 2012 general election was hacked. The purpose was to eliminate all of the GOP candidates that any normal human being would be capable of liking.
That’s why.
I never liked the Romney camp’s plan to wait, and wait, and wait some more and then deliver a blizzard of ads. It was like Giulani’s “plan” in 2008 writ large.
And the GOP primary process was an energy and money-sapping calamity that left the GOP exhausted just when they needed to be building their case to counter the early efforts of the Democrats. One telling sign of Republican stupidity was to abandon the winner-take-all primary vote process, and instead to adopt the “progressive” Democrat model. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
What you said, I think Romney has now officially taken the crown from Giuliani for “worst campaign in modern history”. (Romney’s “47 percent” solution gets honorable mention).
You cannot just target the middle percent of undecideds. You have to target EVERYONE. You have to have a narrative. You have to lead. Not try to sleaze into office. You can lead stark raving naked or you can lead twirling a staff in front of a brass band, or waving a rifle or setting your hair on fire, but sitting at the country club bar drinking milk, won’t do it. Maybe that worked for him at Bain, but it didn’t work here, and somehow I’m not entirely sorry that it failed.
Bozo, I disagree. The 2008 over too soon primary gave us a John McCain totally unprepared to campaign. The longer 2012 campaign made Mitt Romney into a much tougher candidate by late spring, but then he did nothing memorable most of the summer. The Mitt Romney who picked Paul Ryan as his VP nominee looked like a competent executive. The Mitt Romney who showed up prepared for the first debate looked like a winner. The Mitt Romney who attracted more than 30,000 people to his final rallies sounded like a winner. Unfortunately the Obama campaign defined Mitt Romney as unacceptable to the low-information voter in the time after the primaries were over. Potential voters had already tuned out the election by the time Team Romney showed signs of life.
repubs are smart but too good for their own good
dumb dems play it smart by going after the stupid
The Republicans sadly were the only one’s left to turn out the lights on America.
America, like the Titanic, has submerged and it’s a couple of miles to the cold bottom resting place of history.
“Low-info voters”
ROFLMAO
AKA “stupid morons”…..
Well, Penelope Trunk’s kids were steeped in swing state ads. I think their take is closer to what was sold
1. There were plenty of attempts to game the system in 2012, but they were Republican attempts. You guys have been trying to keep the wrong sort, i.e., black people and Hispanics, from voting for a very long time. Your anti-American antics backfired. How sad. Cheer up. You may yet succeed in turning America into Mississippi. That’s the plan, right?
2. Nobody told more lies in this campaign than the Republicans: from the shipping jobs to China bit to the attack on welfare reform scam, you showed no sense of decency whatsoever. I understand Romney’s take on all this: there is nothing wrong with lying to non-Mormans, but some of you guys are Christians. Well, your Christianity is pretty nominal too. Jesus was far too much of a leftist for your tastes.
I’m not sure what to say to this sort of foolishness, but I’ll try and respond.
Whether you voted for Obama (my guess) or someone else, you lost last Tuesday. Obama has *no* plan for the economy, never did, never will. I’m not one of the conspiracy buffs who think he’s a closet Marxist or whatever; no, I think he’s brilliant, and pretty stupid, a sort of Sheldon Cooper who went to Law School rather than Cal Tech. He’s never run anything in his life, successfully or not, and on-the-job training only works if you’re willing to use trial-and-error. That only works if you’re willing to admit to making mistakes, and Obama’s big mistake in his first term, to hear him tell it, was that he didn’t sell the public well enough on the great job he’d done running the economy. My translation: he didn’t go on the Tonight Show enough. His only real solution to the problem: borrow more money from the Chinese, print more cash and use it to buy Treasury bonds at *above* market price from his cronies at Goldman Sachs, and complain about the private sector. No matter how much he raises their taxes, increases the regulation on them, and rants about how they’re the problem, they haven’t recovered, and the economy hasn’t grown as a result. It’s as if they think he’s out to get them, or something!
You guys, collectively, are Wile E. Coyote. You are focused on the “fiscal cliff” which approaches, and don’t realize that you already ran off the edge 3-4 years ago. All that’s underneath your feet is open air…
It probably won’t help to point this out, but CEOs make lousy presidents because their experience of the world is actually quite narrow. See, there was this guy named Hoover…
As far as Obama’s economic policy is concerned, I do have a criticism. At a time when a balls-out stimulative approach was indicated, he went for halfway. That managed to save us from the European situation where austerian Republican policies have plunged a continent into a second recession. Obama’s approach may have been as good a policy as he have managed granted the desire of he tRepublicans to destroy the economy for political advantage; but, at least in principle, we could have done better.
Jim:
You are clearly a low information voter when it comes to history. Hoover was more like Obama than Romney. While he eventually started his own company He never was true CEO. He was a mining engineer who was quite the intellectual (well Obama isn’t much of an intellectual. He is only marginally more intelligenct than John Kerry) In the end he was a government guy who took an engineer’s approach to solving problems. Sometimes they worked out like saving Europe from starvation after WWI and sometimes they didn’t when he took a luke warm Keynsian approach to the beginnings of the Great Depression. Most of FDR’s New Deal program was just pumping more money and government into Hoover’s action plan. I hope this helps you upgrade your information base.
Your understanding of what is going on in Europe is pretty lame. When the Europeans talk about “austerity”, they mean tax hikes. No talk ever about spending cuts. Hmm, tax hikes – a Republican concept? Don’t think so, sounds very Democratic. They believe that increased borrowing and stimulus spending will “grow” the economy and get them out of the hole they have been digging during the past 30 years. Definitely not another Republican concept. Your idiotic belief that whatever stimulus is applied is never enough is ludicrous. How about $5 trillion during the past 4 years.
Nice to see the lying fascist pigs again.
What’s funny is that this stupid moron…excuse me…”low-info voter”…thinks he’s spouting facts.
One perusal through Jim Harrison’s vacuous blog deems him a sure low information voter, so devoid of sense he even advertises it. But the idiocy goes well beyond simple low information. Jim’s the worst of the worst – a deviant, immoral, propagandizing low information voter.
A real monster…with no redeeming value – the perfect Obama stooge.
I’m amused that you right wingers have picked up the “low information voter” bit since that expression was first used by liberals to explain conservative behavior. Well, it’s an old pattern. You folks make an industry out of projection.
When Christianity first arrived in barbarian Germany, the pagans reacted to its superior organization and worked-out theology by attempting to mimic it. Something similar occurred in Tibet where the indigenous shamans reacted to the arrival of the Buddhists by devising the Bon religion. In both cases, what was intended as a copy turned out to be more like a parody just as your attempts to sound sophisticated when you talk about ideology are actually pretty ridiculous. You can’t even tell a moderate democrat from a Marxist and yet you want to sound Postmodern?
Who are you kidding? Taylor, like about 75% of this cessppit… erm… echo chamber… is so far around the bend that he can’t tell the difference between a marxist and me, a standard issue republican moderate. To them, I am a leftist. Anything to the left of a knuckle dragging teabagger or bible beater here is little more than an amoral libertine looking for a spot marked X, willing to sell their soul to the muslims, and so on.
Low information voter? Nonsense on both sides. Even those who reckon themselves as high information are drinking from an info stream tailored to their preconceptions. The left reveres Maher and the right reveres Limbaugh. The left sees Fox as right wing propaganda (it’s not) and the right sees the rest of the media as something that would make Pravda blush. Do both sets play to their audiences? Obviously. Try to be realistic.
As a recovering Mississippian I take offense at your post. But, that was probably your intent.
The president has been reelected (it appears) and so its all on him now. No more boogeyman courtesy of George Bush. Let’s see what he’s got. I don’t know any angry white men, but, I suspect they are NOT sitting around the locker room at the country club hoping for the economy to collapse.
So, what’s being said here is–forget actual information, forget policy, forget history, forget economics, forget science, forget U.S. national interests, forget strategy and geography, forget the long view—because today there are just so many ill-informed morons (and deliberately so), who can very easily be fooled and who vote here in the U.S. that, henceforward, anyone who wants even the slightest chance of winning has to very largely craft his campaign to appeal to and to get through to these—to use Michelle Obama’s apparently all too accurate terminology, “knuckleheads”—a “lowest common denominator” campaign to get these morons hating the opposition and fearful of it, and all excited over something or other—no matter how illusory, asinine, or wrong-headed–and marching into the voting booths all over the U.S. to vote for the Pied Piper of the day, as they apparently just did.
In a word, yes.
It appears to have worked. The only people who would be proud of the accomplishment are those who don’t give a fig about the future of the USA, and are fixated on power to enact their will.
Time to re-look voting franchise qualifications. Net income tax payer, home/real property owner, military service, or some combination thereof would be a nice place to start the conversation.
The great thing about this intrusion is that they can merge it with Obamacare and be able to give you a colonoscopy while sitting in front of the TV.
To Anonymous under 2, above. I am interested to know to what country you are planning to move your money. Seriously. Also, be careful of paying off your debt. Debt may actually turn out to be good if there is inflation, which seems very likely. Under inflation, savers are robbed because their money is worth less. Right now there is little inflation, but what is the use of having savings? The stock market has gone up a lot but it is running on Mr. Bernanke’s smoke and mirrors and could collapse at any time. Money market funds? Well, Tim Geithner and Mary Shapiro and friends are trying to make sure they are safe, (uh huh) but they could be the next shoe to drop. In recent memory people could make 4% on safe CDs but thanks to the Fed’s tender mercies savers have been robbed of that source of income. Same goes for Treasuries. A little bit of debt may be OK as long as you have some cash flow to service it because all the government’s policies are geared to helping debtors and stealing from savers. Did you know that the ObamaCare bill stipulates a new tax on rental income? Yes. If you have saved up and invested in a little rental property to fund your old age, the HEALTHCARE BILL (remember “we have to pass the bill before we know what’s in it”??) will take something like 3% more off that income every year beginning next year??. No lie. Sorry friends, it is late and I rant. Time for bed.
switzerland. swiss franc has tripled against the dollar since 1985, and will at least double again against the dollar in the next ten years: because they care about the value of their currency; they care about their culture (large majority just voted to ban construction of any new mosque on the grounds that 4 is enough for a small country); you can’t become a Swiss citizen in any reasonable time, even by marrying a Swiss; and so forth.
Bryan:
Go back and read a couple of things I posted just before and just after the election. (Not that anybody reads my posts) At that time I said that the Obama campaige understood that the key to winning for them was to get low information voters registered and march them off to the polls during the early voting period thus locking in their votes before they could stumble onto information that could change their minds. Republicans campaigned for the election day voters because Republican/conservative leaning voters have fewer low informaton voters in the pool and they wait to get more information before they cast their ballots. You didn’t have to wait for an article by the pros to figure this out.It was all in the early voting data that was trickling out during the last week of the campaign.
Here is what I don’t get about the so-called “liberals” who support Obama: what attracts you to the “groupthink” that has gone beyond CNN, NBC, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, etc. propaganda? “They” literally locked up the guy who allegedly made the video that allegedly spurred the protest (that did not happen) that led to the terrorist attack on Benghazi. “They” reveal the Petraeus affair days after the election but days before his testimony. “They” say that Romney is evil, but don’t cite one example of what he did as governor of MA that would cause anyone to pause. “They” say that Obama is great, or not as bad as Romney, but fail to cite one example of what he has done that is good (OK, except for letting the Seals go after bin Laden).
“They” are telling you what to say and think – and you like it? Whatever happened to independent thought as the liberal way? The freedom to critically think about what a President has and has not done? Obama promised to cut the debt – he raised it at a record pace. Obama promised to create jobs – we have the lowest labor participation rate since women joined the workforce. “They” tell you to ignore the economic realities – salute the most high, Obama – and you salute? Since when did liberals become sycophants?
War is peace, slavery is freedom and ignorance is strength?
The liberals should be the ones up in arms about the pathological lying, propaganda and manipulation – protesting against the massive deception and the “big lie” that this administration has become.
George Orwell was off by only 30 years.
Well said. Just what I have been thinking.
To his credit, the leftist Glenn Greenwald (Salon.com, etc.) has done that.
He repeatedly pleads with his fellow leftists to apply the same standard to judge Obama that they applied to judge Bush: Call him out on his lying, his drone strikes without Congressional authorization, etc. Few of his fellow lefties care.
There are a few of those on Daily KOS too. But they all get silenced. The same way that I was banned from RedState.com for being willing to criticize Bush for Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind.
Daily KOS and RedState.com are out for political POWER, not to be philosophically consistent. Their goals respectively are to elect liberals and conservatives.
The true test of political integrity is whether you’re willing to put your own glass house in order as well as throwing stones at others. Very few political activists–on either side of the political fence–meet that standard.
That’s what progressive liberalism is about nowadays. The Dems aren’t the party of John Kennedy any more, they’re the party of the one collectivist mind. Yes they like that, to them freedom means freedom from having to form a cohesive thought or make any personal decision. Decisions are hard. They actually WANT some bureaucrat to tell them what to think and do.
As for all Obama’s failures, they’re all the fault of Bush and the Republicans, dontcha know?
IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776 The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm
Low-info voters?
Hell, that’s about 98% of voters, 47% of which don’t pay taxes.
This is a revelation?
The Obamaroids never stopped campaigning. Right after 2008 election, they identified the swing states—those that could go Republican in 2012.
Then they identified the lunatic fringe. These are found more within the ranks of the “undecided” than within any party base. No most undecideds are NOT lunatics
but most lunatics are “undecided” as they lack the personal and emotional stability needed to be a party regular. They vote for the most hysterical and
ludicrous opinions around.
In 2008 sensible undecideds voted for Obama. In 2012 these voted for Romney. But the lunatic fringe responded to all the preposterous charges by staying with Obama in 2012 and they were numerous enough in swing states to keep most of those states in the Obama column.
And this appears to have been the plan all along. Axelrod et al knew their man could not win votes—-not with his record But he could and did keep the imbecilic vote and that was all it took.
Question now is, how does he reward them? Going to be interesting.
They’re not going to stop campaigning either.
Now that the Obama campaign built this wonderful campaign operation with quant models and computer programmed micro-targeting of voters, you don’t think they’re just going to dismantle it and shut down, do you?
No, they will now use it to sell Obama’s proposals to the general public. And they will certainly use it in the 2014 congressional election campaign.
The GOP had better catch up.
Speaking of low information voters, why can’t most conservatives understand that what really matters is debt to GDP ratio rather than the absolute dollar amount of debt, and what matters even more than that is the cost of federal government borrowing, which is at historical lows? Why is there all of this near-fainting over the absolute dollar amount of debt, rather than these more meaningful – and less dire – metrics?
Here is a bit of advice from someone with a Ph.D in economics. Don’t run your mouth on economic topics unless you can do math. Our debt to GNP ratio is greater than 1 and our interest payments are low because the Fed has artificially kept interest rates near zero. The later is not sustainable in the long run. If rates climb to 3% then interest payments become the largest component of federal spending. If the Fed does not allow rates to climb they will eventually destroy the currency.
Yup. +1 The currency will be toilet paper with writing on it real soon now. Anyone who has saved for their retirement will be chastened unmercifully by the inflation that is cooked into the books. It is just a matter of time before the rest of the world realizes that the almighty dollar is no more. It was supported by the invisible tax being paid for world peace that the US policeman provided. We will no longer be that policeman, and the rest of the world will no longer be willing to pay the tax. By choice of the administration. Fools.
Over 60 million human beings (they walk and chew gum among us) apparently believed Obama’s crapola, or at least a good portion of it.
Demonstrating beyond a reasonable doubt that the intentional and conscientious brainwashing of 3 or 4 decades in America’s public schools has taken root.
Barack Obama and David Axelrod…found every weakness in the system and their opponent and exploited them all.
I don’t agree with weakness in the system to characterize the machinations of these 2 Chicago thugs.
I’d call it weakness in the brains of their carefully cultivated base. Anyone with 4 brain cells to rub together didn’t fall for their constant stream of lies and attempts to demonize Romney, even going so far as to suggest Romney was a criminal.
“Low information voters” seems like a euphemism.
Useful Idiots seems better.
Obama has been locked in campaign mode since he stepped foot in Chicago. That is all he knows and will continue to do at the peril of those of us who Love what is pure, just, and true. President In Name Only {PINO}, describes better his actions. It’s always someone elses fault, the default is blame Bush or someone that failed in leadership, like multiple Generals. For a President who had unlimited power for his first two years, he only came through on minimal campaign promises. Also, he cowers in the face to face meetings with world leaders which is alone his responsibility. Even voters who take a little time to follow politics know in their gut something is awry.
Bryan
I think you are on the right track but I think you miss a very important point. The tactics they used did not persuade a lot of low information voters to vote for Obama. Look at the vote totals lower in 2012 than in 2008. What they did was persuade a lot of voters who were disgusted with Obama to stay home. Then they had a world class get out the vote effort to deliver everybody who still thought favorably of Obama despite his first four years to the polls.
This effort is helped by the 24/7/365 disparagement of Republicans by the entertainment media so all they had to do was hook onto existing tropes and turn up the volume.
I have a modest proposal. PJTV has already created some outstanding videos that are available to anybody who wants to see them on youtube. The only problem is that somebody has to want to find them on youtube and then click on them. That leaves out low information voters by definition. How much does it cost to run a 15 second spot on some of the less watched cable channels? I am guessing not too much. What if PJTV made some 15 second spots and made them available to anybody who wanted to pay the cost of running the ads. In fact, you could have a pay pal button for each ad allowing people to chip in to run that ad maybe even give people of picking the channel as well. It might turn out that people who watch Animal Planet or Encore Westerns will be better informed about Fast and Furious or Benghazi than people who read the New York Times and watch PBS or the network news.
I doubt that it was extremely low-info voters that turned the Election for Obama’s favor. Extremely low-info voters would be the very tail end of the curve, like about 1%, if even less.
If anything, I’m suspecting Voter Fraud. Think about it, why is it that Obama won despite every single Voter ID state voting AGAINST him? It doesn’t add up. Those ads would have most likely targeted ALL of the United States, yet despite that, the Voter ID states still voted largely for Romney. I know because I live in one: Georgia, and evidence from my actually voting in that election, not to mention news reports about Fulton County actually running out of ballots and having a large delay indicates that voter turnout actually exceeded expectations, not decreased. Besides which, it’s improbable, even in a city that’s exceedingly liberal, to have a 100% voter turnout for Obama, or any liberal candidate, for that matter. The only way that would work is if Obama stole the election.
So here’s the bad part. The people of this country are no longer fit to rule themselves. A republic can only exist while the people are engaged and have integrety. When the people themselves are corrupt you can just about guarantee they will elect a corrupt government. All is not totally lost, the republican house, if it does its duty, will deadlock the government or force it to be responsible with spending. If not, well the US might be better off with single ruler (dictatorship). Not all dictatorships are bad, in fact the millenial rule of Jesus Christ will be a defactor dictatorship, but a fully righteous and benevolent one and will be the golden age of humanity.