Most Mexicans were pleased – and puzzled – with the results of the United States election. The seemingly growing acceptance of the legalization of marijuana gave them nightmares about the increasing power of drug cartels. Almost every Mexican friend has relatives living, legally or illegally, north of the border. The disaffinity for Hispanics, relentlessly declared during the seemingly endless Republican primary campaign process, all of it repeated again during the general election, put them energetically in Obama’s camp. Relatives here wrote to family members in the States urging them to vote for the president. Shyly, Mexicans here would ask U.S. citizens they knew well who they favored.
The shock of unexpected election results hit conservatives with the impact of trauma. It also jarred some Democrats who had resigned themselves to defeat after Barack Obama’s first debate which smacked of indifference or laziness.
Despite the conservative polls, and all the money showered by the rich on Mitt Romney’s campaign, and cheering crowds of supporters, several things were going on that Republican political operatives totally missed.The Obama campaign, echoing a number of political researchers, kept saying that Mitt Romney, despite his advertised corporate skills, had a mathematics problem. “It’s the arithmetic, stupid,” was the chant. Conservatives depended too much on the Rasmussen Reports, and similarly GOP-friendly polls. Rasmussen, especially near the end of the campaign, consistently reported that Obama trailed Romney in many regions, particularly in key swing states: Wisconsin (VP candidate Paul Ryan’s home state), along with Ohio, Florida, Virginia, New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada. But Obama won Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, Iowa. He also won Wisconsin, and Romney’s birth state of Michigan, as well as Romney’s home state of Massachusetts, as well as, finally, Florida – also arithmetically handicapped.
Ironically, the GOP had been attacking all pollsters who at times found Obama ahead, often just barely. The pollster irritating Republicans most was Nate Silver, a former baseball statistician, who got picked up by the New York Times after he did so well in 2008. This time, with the presidential race seemingly very close, Karl Rove&Co. led the charge against Silver’s polling, saying it was “liberal,” it “favored” Obama. So did MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough. He ended up betting Silver 2,000 dollars. Silver noted that if Obama and Romney actually had an equal chance of winning, more Romney people would have been betting. Silver got all 50 states right.
Explaining this kind behavior to Mexican friends can be challenging. Several had been inducted into the U.S. election because they worked for north of the border economic refugees. Some of these folks offered Mexican domestic help colorful “Mitt” or “Mitt & Paul” pins to wear. A couple of these workers, good friends, asked me why foreigners were pressing strange decorative emblems on them. I explained that these were political gear boosting the fortunes of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of a party that wanted to institute what Romney called a “self-deportation” program for Mexicans in the United States. I mentioned that in June, Obama had enacted a solution for at least 800,000 young people who were illegally brought into the U.S. as children. That allowed such non-citizens to remain in the U.S. without fear of deportation. I didn’t give them my opinion of the differing attitudes. It didn’t seem necessary.
Evidently, explaining the election outcome to some Republicans remains somewhat more twisty. Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana, quickly criticized Romney’s November 14 remarks, blaming his loss in part on “gifts” that a “very generous” President Obama had given African Americans, Hispanics and young people. Jindal said at the Republican Governors Association meeting in Las Vegas, “I absolutely reject that notion.” Jindal, the association’s incoming chairman, added, “We need to stop being a dumb party ... we have to stop making dumb comments.” He also startled Republicans by advising them to reject anti-intellectualism. Yet, in 2008, Jindal signed the Louisiana Science Education Act, which sounds good. It was sold as support for critical thinking. But it was designed to “open the door” to teach creationism and scientifically “unwarranted” critiques of evolution in Louisiana public schools, said several Louisiana observers. Jindal ignored the opposition of every scientific society voicing a position, including his former genetics professor, Arthur Landy. The professor wrote, “Without evolution, modern biology, including medicine and biotechnology, wouldn’t make sense.”
And Jindal and other GOP leaders were soon making it clear that they disagreed with Romney’s articulation but not his policies. “We need to modernize our party,” said Jindal. “We don’t need to moderate our party.” This kind of sly double-speak, some journalists and academicians say, has marked the GOP’s strategy for some time. And while its slyness, say these critics, has seen considerable success, it has led to errors in mathematics (otherwise, why was top GOP political guru, Karl Rove, so shocked by the election results). It still misses both demographic shifts and the social media’s rapidity and reach, as well as both obvious and subtle changes in modern political reality, observers on both sides say. Romney lost, a good many such analysts agree, because his campaign basis and its operational strategy was to great extent “one size fits all.” Plus politics’ ever present nemeses: hubris and complacency. Obama displayed this in his first, disastrous, debate with Romney. Such a mistake, once made, is severely avoided – which in turn helps avoid gaffes. “As Romney – and several other GOP candidates – proved, you only get a screw-up like that once in a campaign,” said one politician.
A run for the presidency succeeds because of both large (thus apparent) and subtle (often unnoticed) choices in matters of strategy. For Obama one fount of such strategic material in part was a secret simply because it was little noticed. Early last year Obama’s top planners enlisted the help of a group of social scientists, gathered by Dr. Craig Fox, a UCLA behavioral economist. Later, that group consulted with the Analyst Institute, a D.C. voter research group, established by union officials and friends to aide Democratic candidates. Generally unnoticed, was an unpaid panel of academic advisers who called themselves the Consortium of Behavioral Scientists. This combined three-pronged high voltage corps bristled with ideas on how to track and counter false rumors, attract and motivate energetic, bright volunteers and voter motivators. Dr. Fox called it “a dream team,” ready to operate in the reality of a totally changed political culture.
This kind of stuff is hard to explain to some pueblo Mexican friends (most with six spotty years of poor education). All had relatives in the United Sates, some of whom were getting ready to move, if Romney won, not back to Mexico, but out of states that, during the primary and the general campaign, made their racism explicit. Leading that list: obviously Arizona, which preys on Mexicans, jails them for minor offenses, and works them on chain gangs. Others making the “ugly list”: Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Utah, Oklahoma, etc. Plus, oddly, a slice of Connecticut: New Haven, where Hispanics live in fear of the police, and are now abandoning. Leonard Gallo, New Haven’s police chief has resigned as an anti-Latino harassment probe continues. Obama won the state.
Yet Romney won 59 percent of the nation’s white vote, more than any candidate who has lost has ever accumulated. Latinos gave Obama 75 percent of their vote, more than anyone since Bill Clinton, calming earlier Latino jitters, and helping the president over the top. To underline what this means for the future of the seemingly unattentive GOP, Michael Steele, the first African-American chairman of the Republican National Committee (2009-2011), has pointed out that “Every month 50,000 Hispanics turn 18 years old – what is the GOP going to do about that?”