Apparently Newt Gingrich was finally coming to terms with the 'shocking' election results. But there was a quote in the article which had me really surprised. The media seems to have missed this amazing statistic. But here's the quote first:
"But if you had said to me three weeks ago Mitt Romney would get fewer votes than John McCain and it looks like he'll be 2 million fewer, I would have been dumbfounded."Wait, what? Did Romney get fewer votes than McCain? Well turns out he actually did! Here is the vote share for 2008
So McCain got 59,934,814 votes in 2008. Now lets look at what Romney got (keep in mind, votes are still trickling in due to absentee and postal ballots. But we have a good enough estimate now):
Romney has only 58,805,092 votes so far. This will go up a little bit, but not by much. So Romney indeed got fewer votes than McCain. However there is a caveat to that observation. As you can obviously see, the percentage vote share for Romney is much higher than McCain ( 48% vs 45.7% ). And correspondingly you can see that Obama got much fewer votes as compared to 4 years ago. What it means is 2 things:
- The percentage of people voting this year has fallen down quite a bit from 2008. This speaks to the general disillusionment of the country towards politics in general and elections in particular. So much for $6bn spent on the campaigns.
- Its not surprising for the incumbent candidate ( or party ) to get fewer votes, but its the challenger that needs to enthuse its own base. And clearly the Republicans failed to do so. Amidst all the talk of Republicans not appealing to Latinos and other minorities, what is overlooked is the fact that the core conservative base itself didn't feel so strongly about Romney. And also the 'conservative' rage ( including the Tea party movement) was misplaced and frankly quite factitious. If they were really angry they would have come out to vote in much larger numbers.