“What’s been interesting to watch is that our data has been remarkably
consistent really from last spring forward, and our battleground polls
really didn’t fluctuate much. There were times when it would dip to
where we had a 2-point lead in the battleground states. There’s one poll
over the course that we had a 1-point lead.  By and large, we’ve been 3
and 4 points ahead in the battleground polls.”

— David Axelrod, in an interview with Mike Allen, giving a postmortem on the 2012 presidential campaign.

Even though Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) won re-election at the same time he was on the national ticket, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel notes he was crushed in his hometown of Janesville, WI by challenger Rob Zerban (D), 55% to 44%. Ryan had never lost Janesville in a re-election campaign before.

In addition, the Obama-Biden ticket defeated Romney-Ryan ticket in Janesville by a whopping 25 points, 62% to 37%.

“The drop-off from the Ryan congressional vote to the Romney-Ryan presidential vote was much larger in Janesville (7.2 points) than it was in the rest of the congressional district (3 points). Put another way, there were more Ryan ticket-splitters in Janesville than other places: people who voted for Ryan for Congress but against Ryan for vice president.”

Fox News: What’s next for Paul Ryan?

Roy Moore (R), forever known as Alabama’s Ten Commandments judge, “has been re-elected chief justice in a triumphant political resurrection after being ousted from that office nearly a decade ago,” the Biloxi Sun-Herald reports.

Said Moore to his supporters: “Go home with the knowledge that we are going to stand for the acknowledgment of God.”

Michael Scherer talks to Michael Smerconish about the microtargeting and backroom number crunching that won the 2012 election.

[Read more…]

Mitt Romney’s campaign boasted for weeks about their voter-targeting sytem called ORCA, “named for the killer whale, that cost substantial resources to build over months,” Politico reports.

“Instead, Romney campaign officials were mostly flying without instruments on election day. Numerous Republicans in and around the Romney campaign called the ORCA platform a total bust, stranding thousands of volunteers without a way of reporting data back to headquarters and leaving Romney central command without a clear view of developments on the ground.”

David Maraniss: “Second terms often bring a new set of frustrations for a president,
following the laws of diminishing returns and lame-duckiness. But
history also shows that a second term is required to create, or to
ratify, presidential greatness — and in that sense, Obama is not
ambivalent about his ambitions. Since he first thought about being
president, a notion that came to him relatively late compared with most
politicians, he has wanted to be a great one. When he stepped onto the
stage Tuesday night, he realized that he has that chance.”

The CEO of Murray Energy, an Ohio-based coal company, said the reelection of President Obama “was no cause for celebration. It was a time for prayer – and layoffs,” the Washington Post reports.

Robert Murray read a prayer to a group of company staff members on the day after the election, lamenting the direction of the country and asking: “Lord, please forgive me and anyone with me in Murray Energy Corp. for the decisions that we are now forced to make to preserve the very existence of any of the enterprises that you have helped us build.”

He then announced layoffs of 156 people at two subsidiaries.

This is the same company that forced its employees to attend a Mitt Romney rally last summer and lose pay as a result.

President Obama delivered a statement today, his first to the White House press corps since winning reelection, on the budget issues facing Congress in the lame duck session.

The president did not take questions, as BuzzFeed notes, the first time a reelected president has done so since before Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1984.

Lexington: “Todd Akin did not implode as a Senate candidate because of his stern opposition to abortion even in cases of rape or incest: many Republicans in Congress share those views. His downfall came because in trying to deny that his principles involved a trade-off with compassion for rape victims he came up with the unscientific myth that the bodies of women subjected to rape can shut down a pregnancy.”

“It was a telling moment of denial, much like the comforting myth that there is no such thing as climate change or, if there is, that humans are not involved. Ensconced in a parallel world of conservative news sources and conservative arguments, all manner of comforting alternative visions of reality surfaced during the 2012 election. Many, like Mr Akin’s outburst, involved avoiding having to think about unwelcome things (often basic science or economics). It became a nostrum among rank-and-file Republicans that mainstream opinion polls are biased and should be ignored, for instance, and that voter fraud is rampant and explains much of the Democrats’ inner-city support. Both conspiracies sounded a lot like ways of wishing the other side away.”

Joshua Spivak reports there were 22 Election Day recall races and 12 officials were removed from office while 10 survived.

“The most prominent recalls — the Troy, Michigan Mayor and the San Fernando, California Mayor and Two Council members — saw the officials kicked out. Two of the multi-official recalls saw a split decision, which is generally unusual. Most multi-official recalls are clean sweeps, one way or the other.”

“And in other recall-related news, one of the Wisconsin Senators who gained office in the 2011 recalls lost and the state Senate flipped from Democratic to Republican. In Arizona, the state Senator who ousted Senate Majority Leader Russell Pearce in the 2011 recall lost his seat.”

Many Romney insiders blame Newt Gingrich’s attacks in the GOP primaries for Mitt Romney’s loss in the presidential election, Fortune reports.

Said one consultant: “No one in the campaign believed that Republicans would attack business enterprise in a primary contest. That was, in hindsight, a big mistake.”

The source goes on to explain: “By late summer there wasn’t even one particular thing he did at Bain that really mattered anymore. In fact, you didn’t even have to say Bain. People just instinctively believed that he had outsourced people, fired people, not cared about people. It wasn’t about what had actually happened, or about policy. It wasn’t substantive. But it got the job done.””

Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) had a simple explanation for why Republicans didn’t do better in U.S. Senate races, Ben Smith reports.

And it wasn’t about the party being too conservative.

Said Barbour: “We had some shitty candidates. We pissed away two seats.”