The meme began with Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator, here, whose real motive was to beat up the party for nominating another moderate:
"On Tuesday night, it comes clear, as this is written using the latest Fox News figures, Mitt Romney lost to President Obama by 2,819,339 votes. And the news ekes out that Moderate Nominee Number 10 Romney received some 3 million Republican votes less than Moderate Nominee Number 9 -- John McCain in 2008."
Blurted out as it was on November 8, 2012, no one could possibly have known that to be true at the time or trust it, but it has been accepted and remains endlessly repeated as the truth, mostly by the likes of Rush Limbaugh who uses it to browbeat his audience whenever someone spills some lemonade on the still open wound of the Romney defeat. The Republican base was at fault for not showing up, we are told, and Rush is never going to let you forget it. He's as angry at the right as John McCain is, but the meme just reverberates down through the conservative food chain through every microphone until you just want to scream out loud because it simply isn't true.
This is demoralizing for everyone and needed to stop long ago. But why it hasn't stopped has more to do with conservatives' penchant for self-flagellation for their failure to find a new Reagan than with anything else. What they should be doing is trying to learn something from the episode so that they do win next time, but you get the feeling that they don't do that because they really don't believe that they can win next time. Republicans want a Saviour to do the job for them, instead of doing it themselves.
I know why this is, and so do you.
Conservatives have become prisoners of a utopian dream. They keep thinking that if the right guy or gal comes along in the mold of the Gipper, we'll finally, finally, be able to take over the government and show everybody how it's supposed to be done once again, and all will be right with the world.
This is crazy.
The fact is there were just eight states lost by Romney to Obama in 2012 where McCain did better. Here they are, showing how many more votes McCain got than Romney:
Ohio: 16,383
New Mexico: 11,044
California: 171,823
New Jersey: 134,458
New York: 262,275
Maine: 2,997
Vermont: 6,276
Rhode Island: 8,187
Total votes by which McCain did better than Romney, but still lost: 613,443 . . . nowhere near 3 million.
Keep in mind that Romney garnered a net 984,084 more votes nationwide than McCain did in 2008, despite that under-performance in eight states detailed above, and despite what Jeffrey Lord told you in the wake of the election and people like Rush Limbaugh have endlessly repeated ever since. On top of that net better performance, Romney also won North Carolina and Indiana, both of which McCain had lost in bitterly narrow outcomes in 2008. Romney ended up winning 24 states vs. only 22 for McCain. You don't do that with 3 million Republicans staying home in 2012 who didn't in 2008.
To think so now at this late date is a form of mental illness.
Romney's better performance than McCain overall was despite two important factors working against Romney: a lower turnout nationwide in 2012 by 1.6% overall compared to 2008 (2.2 million); and a suppressed voter turnout in New Jersey and New York because of Hurricane Sandy right before the election, which makes McCain's better performance than Romney in those two liberal states in 2008 look questionable, quite apart from being inconsequential.
In New Jersey and New York in 2012 5.9% and 7.3% fewer votes respectively were cast than in 2008, alone totaling a whopping 789,000 votes. Based on Romney's performance in those two states in 2012, as many as 288,000 of those votes could have been his but were not, due to weather related impacts on the election. But they hardly mattered except to show that McCain's so-called out-performance was nothing of the kind.
The only state of the above eight which really mattered for Romney in the 2012 calculus to win was Ohio, where Romney lost by 2.98 points, or 166,272 votes.
Turnout in Ohio was also down in 2012, by 2.3% or 131,000, a rate of no-showing almost 44% higher than in the country as a whole (Just where was Gov. John Kasich when we needed him, hm?). With third party voting in Ohio turning out the same percentage in 2012 as it had in 2008, you have to reckon with the fact that Ohio's 101,788 third party votes in 2012 had a greater impact on the outcome in the lower turnout environment of 2012, and they did.
49,493 of those third party votes in Ohio went to the self-described Republican spoiler from the Libertarian Party, the Republican Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico, who was just coming off being snubbed by the Republican Party in the presidential debates of late 2011. Another 33,722 votes in Ohio went to assorted libertarian and right of center fruits, nuts and flakes. Then add in the known 16,383 who voted for McCain in 2008 but not for Romney in 2012 and you're up to 99,598 of the 166,272 Romney lost by in Ohio in 2012. That leaves 66,674 additional votes Romney lost to account for, which as luck would have it is about 51% of the total reduced turnout, closely enough mirroring the 47.6% by which Romney ended up losing in Ohio to satisfy the equation's solution. The point is there was nothing terribly unusual about this outcome which couldn't have been remedied by a better boots on the ground operation than Romney fielded, outnumbered as it was by Obama by 10 to 1. Romney's failure in Ohio was remediable.
One gets the feeling from that that Romney too was looking for a Saviour when he should have been working harder. Only after the election was it confirmed by his family that he really didn't have the fire in the belly. We should have known. "ObamaCare's not worth getting angry about". "I'm not going to light my hair on fire".
Ohio, plus New Hampshire, Virginia and Florida in the east together would have given Romney the 270 electoral votes he needed instead of the 206 he actually received. Romney lost those four states, and the presidency, by just 429,522 votes.
Not.3.million.
