Via commentor Rob in Buffalo, sore loser Dick Morris on what he is pleased to call “an Obama squeaker“:
… By the time you finish with the various demographic groups the Democrats win, you almost have a majority in their corner. Count them: Blacks cast 13% of the vote and Obama won them 12-1. Latinos cast 10% and Obama carried them by 7-3. Under 30 voters cast 19% of the vote and Obama swept them by 12-7. Single white women cast 18% of the total vote and Obama won them by 12-6. There is some overlap among these groups, of course, but without allowing for any, Obama won 43-17 before the first married white woman or man over 30 cast their vote. (Lets guess that if we eliminate duplication, the Obama margin would be 35-13) Having conceded these votes, Romney would have had to win over two-thirds of the rest of the vote to win. He almost did. But not quite…
Shorter Morris Math: Sure, Obama got 332 electoral votes. But if each Democrat only got three-fifths of a vote, like the Founding Fathers intended, that would be only 198 to Romney’s 206!
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S.
I hate these assholes.
The Moar You Know
And the 21st century Dolchstoßlegende myth begins.
Culture of Truth
L-L-L-Lu-luh-luh-luuuuuhhhoooser
Citizen Alan
How is it possible that the opinions of a whore-mongering foot fetishist are taken seriously?!? Oh wait, never mind. The GOP has a whore-mongering DIAPER fetishist who keeps being reelected to the Senate!
Southern Beale
Right so Obama surpassed the 64M vote mark, he’s got over 4 million vote lead over Mitt Romney — 1 million more than Bush’s ’04 lead over Kerry. You know, when Bush had a “mandate”? But right, call it a “squeaker” if you want, Dick.
schrodinger's cat
BTW, why did Clinton ever hire this guy?
MattF
Oh, that sneaky Obama! Went and put together an overall majority and a majority of electoral votes! And he did it by attracting votes! And voters! Totally unfair!
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S.
@Citizen Alan:
Well, to be fair, Vitter has only won reelection once, so it isn’t quite fair to say he keeps getting reelected. After 2016, then it’ll be fair.
Tonybrown74
They are trying their hardest to re-create the bubble.
Too much fresh air (and reality) is getting in the breach!
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Maybe he’s the one running the Conservative Factcheck website LGF highlights. You know, because if you take the number of times that Politifact reported that Romney lied, and if you compare it to the number of times that Politifact reported Obama lied, clearly there was bias against Romney. It has nothing to do with the fact that Romney lied more often.
aarrgghh
classic toesucker:
“… y’know, george bush basically believes the federal government should do two things: fight wars and help people recover from disasters and now he’s got both on his plate. i think that his ratings are gonna soar! not necessarily in the next three days, but over the next year he’s gonna look so good doing all this stuff…
[snip]
… you have a president that doesn’t think government should do a lot. but he believes they should fight wars and that was the first term, and they believe they should recover from disasters and that’s the second term. man, is this guy fortunate!”
MattF
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): If ‘more often’ really means ‘all the time’.
aarrgghh
more classic toesucking:
“i think that withdrawal from iraq, it obviously gives al qaeda a huge victory — huge victory. on the other hand, if we stay in iraq, it gives them the opportunity to kill more americans, which they really like.
one of the things, though, that i think that the anti-war crowd has not considered, is that if we’re putting the americans right within their [the terrorists’] arms’ reach, they don’t have to come to wall street to kill americans. they don’t have to knock down the trade center. they can do it around the corner, and convenience is a big factor when you’re a terrorist.”
Culture of Truth
I’ve said it 100 times since 2007. Obama is cheating by being popular.
Yutsano
Uhh…LOLWUT Dick?
danimal
Gawd, it drives me crazy that the inherent racism behind Morris’ claim is completely invisible to so many white Fox News viewers.
It makes me crazier that this inherent racism is invisible to a large number of CNN viewers and many MSNBC viewers as well. Arrrrrrggggh.
Roger Moore
Shorter Dick Morris: It only counts as a real win if you get a majority of the White vote.
MTiffany
Can we camp out in front of these people’s houses (Morris, Noonan, Scarborough et cetera) and chant “Fuck you!” over and over again?
Just Some Fuckhead
This is like the political version of “Everything is simple when you remove all the complicated stuff.”
LanceThruster
What were the percentages for foot suckers?
Higgs Boson's Mate
Just so that no one in the GOP even considers for a second that their nominee was a transparent phony and that his policies and stated beliefs, though they changed from hour to hour, were either ludicrous or appalling. Obama obviously won because he had the votes of all of people who shouldn’t have been allowed to vote in the first place.
Laertes
“Obama’s dropped from a 7 point margin over McCain to a 1 point margin over Romney.”
Wait. What?
He won by around 3%. Where’s Dick getting this 1% business?
MattF
@Just Some Fuckhead: “The US is a center-right country if you ignore the liberals.”
NonyNony
I actually love this – it plays into my schadenfreude:
With “the rest of the vote” meaning “white men and married women”.
Left unsaid is that Mitt Romney would have had to achieve a percentage of that demographic larger than Ronald Reagan achieved in 1984, and no presidential candidate has gotten that much of the “white men and married women” vote since.
Sad_Dem
The Texan, that character in Catch-22 who said that some people should get more votes than others, is alive and well.
rlrr
@Laertes:
1 = 3 for sufficiently small values of 3.
rlrr
@Roger Moore:
Isn’t that exactly what a lot of conservatives are saying?
Mike in NC
@Laertes:
He must be using McMeagan’s calculator.
The Moar You Know
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: Wait. I thought that was Romney’s appeal!
Gotta say, I’ve never seen a presidential loser vanish from sight as fast as Romney has. I think the entire party is ashamed and just wants to forget the election ever happened.
Sophist
@MTiffany:
Occupy Gated Community?
Chris
@aarrgghh:
Better to offer soldiers up as tribute than to risk death for our precious precious Wall Street!
Chris
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
I’m surprised there hasn’t been more of a crucifixion of Romney; they certainly didn’t wait long to start doing it to McCain.
Supernumerary Charioteer
@Laertes: He made the comments fairly early on (Nov. 7), after the election had been called but before all the votes had been counted. The majority of the yet-uncounted votes, which were from urban areas, went to Obama, so it appeared when he made the post that Obama had won a smaller share of the vote than he actually did.
Reflexive spinning, intellectual laziness, or both?
(The answer is most likely both.)
Brachiator
@danimal:
Naw, I’m pretty sure they get it. The GOP is ramping up more loudly the claim that unworthy blacks and Latinos teamed up with white sluts hopped up on birth control pills to steal the election from noble Real White American Men.
And then strangely, they keep hoping for the magical day when these groups will remember their place, reject their uppity black president, and dociley allow Bill O’Reilly’s beloved “white establishment” to return to power.
Shorter: these basterds are both racist and seriously deluded.
catclub
Washington Monthly points out Bruce Bartlett’s article on why he was ejected from the Conservative Bund – too much facing reality with open eyes. Fascinating.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revenge-of-the-reality-based-community/
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Chris:
Not currently occupying any elected office and being persona non grata on the Sunday shows, Romney has little or nothing in the way of a public microphone with which to hurt the party going forward, so he can be turned into an unperson in ways that post-2008 McCain could not.
Conversely, McCain had no financial resources post-election with which to pay hush money to the people who worked for him at a high level, so they all rushed off to cash in on their insider tell-all accounts regarding how fucked up the 2008 campaign was. I’m guessing that Romney has done a better job of paying off the most highly placed weasels and con-artists from his entourage, not mention that the more clever amongst them are probably hoping to keep the GOP grift-train running thru 2016 and beyond. What trashing of Romney is happening, is probably happening behind closed doors, where today’s suckers are being converted into tomorrow’s gravy train even as we speak.
different-church-lady
@Mike in NC:
No, if he were he would have come up with either .3% or 300%
different-church-lady
@Brachiator:
FTFY
Jamey
I knew Dick would dip a toe into those waters…
Bulworth
Glad Morris is bringing up this very important feature of elections under the Constitution. Obviously, since Obama failed to win a “majority” of these groups added together, or something, he didn’t really win. //
cmorenc
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
While focusing on the semi-closeted bigotry of Morris’s dismissiveness toward key groups in Obama’s coalition, perhaps we should worry lots more about the not-so-closeted elephant standing behind him: that such a transparent sociopathic phony could still get 47% of the electorate to vote for him and ONLY lose by apx. 4 million votes. That’s 20% of the electorate above and beyond the 27% who are blatantly foaming-at-the-mouth insane.
different-church-lady
@catclub:
My god, that man is an idiot.Correction: he was an idiot. My skimming merely happened to pick up on all the most idiotic parts of his past beliefs and none of the evolutions in his thinking.
Bob In Portland
What’s his point?
catclub
@different-church-lady: If you mean Bartlett, I disagree. A very principled slow learner. The last reality he faced up to was the insanity of his own side. Not that surprising.
The story is still fascinating.
The episode where his apostasy was not even noticed, because it was in the NYT and almost no one on his side even read it, was the kind of thing I had in mind.
ETA: waah, you edited yours while I was responding to it. Cheers.
different-church-lady
@catclub: see my update at 42, which concurs.
different-church-lady
Y’all realize the very reason Dick Morris appears on the TV is because he’s a circus clown, yes?
Nylund
I am not a Dick Morris fan by any stretch of the imagination, but the post, as presented, is a bit silly.
He presents four groups: Blacks, Latinos, under 30, and single white women. He’s pointing out that these aren’t mutually exclusive groups.
For example, a single white hispanic woman who is under 30 falls into three of the four categories above (being latino, being a single white woman, and being under 30). [note: I’m following the US census differentiation between race and ethnicity where latino is an ethnicity and a latino can be of any race, eg. hispanic white v. non-hispanic white].
If you just add up all three, you’re counting that same person three times. The groups aren’t mutually exclusive. In order to get a proper count, you have to take into consideration the individuals who are counted in more than one group. That’s just sound math.
To equate sound math with the idea that certain people are discounted due to bigotry (as was the case with the 3/5 rule) is just plain wrong. There is no bigotry here. It is not that Democrats count less. It’s just that these are overlapping categories and some individuals are counting more than once due to that overlap.
I love Balloon Juice and I think Dick Morris is an idiot. Please don’t write posts so poorly thought out that Dick Morris ends up being right and Balloon Juice wrong.
Seriously. Dick Morris is an IDIOT. A world class idiot. Don’t write things so stupid that he’s actually the one who’s right. There are plenty of posts one could write to highlight his idiocy.
? Martin
@Laertes:
AL engaged the wayback machine a bit for this one. It was published on Nov 7. Half of CA was still being counted, and lots of votes in NY and NJ hadn’t been counted yet either. All of those provisional ballots largely broke for Obama and most were counted after Morris published that piece – it was a 1% margin, or thereabout then.
@cmorenc:
Don’t go overboard on that classification. Obama’s approval is up to 53/39, which suggests that a lot of those Romney voters don’t disapprove of Obama. Most voters don’t pay attention anywhere near the level we do. They vote along party lines because they’ve always voted along party lines, because states develop cultures within them which are hard to shake loose.
The Moar You Know
@catclub: Fascinating due to its staggering lack of self-awareness is more like it. He’s responsible for a lot of the insanity of the Republican party and still doesn’t understand that the policies and viewpoints that he very enthusiastically promoted could only lead to one and only one conclusion – the one that finds him unemployed and persona non grata amongst conservatives.
Hope he dies broke, alone and unloved.
Alex
Moar:
The “Romney Landslide” which Morris predicted was a 325-213 electoral college victory, while the “squeaker” which Obama eked out was a 332-206 electoral college victory.
Stupid, lying motherfucker cannot even eat crow honestly.
Scott Supak
The stat that would blow Dicky’s mind is that Obama and Romney split evenly (at 49%) the straight vote, but Obama won the 5% of Americans who identified as gay in the exit polls with about 75% of them.
So, thank you gay people for winning the election for the first president to support gay marriage! Yay!
different-church-lady
@Nylund: I believe Anne’s reference to 3/5ths is not in regard to mathematics, but rather the Three-Fifths Compromise.
lamh35
What’s that they say about Karma??? Oh yeah, “She’s a bitch, yo”.
Romney’s share of the popular vote now at point where it will be rounded down to 47%.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/26/1164808/-Mitt-Romney-47-percent-watch-47
1badbaba3
@schrodinger’s cat: Shared oral fixation?
Fuck Dick Morris with a ‘ho toenail. Make it a double.
RareSanity
So Dick is saying that if the election were based, solely on the demographic of people were Romney had the strongest support, he would have won?
Now that’s some political genius there…
@Bob In Portland:
That this election was not really decided by the “majority”. It was decided by a bunch of minorities, that joined forces, to create their own majority.
Or, in other words, it’s no fair that middle-aged white men and their wives, were not the ones to tell “those people” what they think is best for them.
“Those people” decided all on their own…like their opinions are in some way equal to married, middle-aged white people. How positively crass of “those people”!
? Martin
@Nylund:
It’s not the math here that’s the problem (though that’s also a problem).
The problem is that Morris, along with a huge swath of the GOP present the argument as follows:
Obama won young people, women, blacks, asians, latinos, gays, college educated – basically every sub-demographic tracked other than whites and men, specifically white men. But that was always waved away as immaterial. What mattered was who could win the white male vote. That’s where mandates come from – older white men. That’s who really represents america – older white men. That’s why it’s a squeaker – because Obama lost older white men, regardless of what the overall margin was, regardless of the fact that Obama won both elections by higher margins than George Bush won either of his elections.
The tell is here:
Everyone but older white men are put aside as ‘incidental’. The GOP was treating them as incidental, and now they have this ‘oh shit’ moment – the country has been permanently reshaped. As Bill O’Reilly put it ‘The white establishment is now the minority’.
Seanly
@Nylund:
You misunderstood the joke. The US Constitution states in Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 that slaves count as 3/5 of a person for determining the number of representatives which a state will get. This was superceded by the 13th & 14th amendments.
Tonal Crow
Shorter Dick Morris’s superego: “You lost, Democrats won, elections have consequences!”
Shorter Dick Morris’s id: “Shut up you libtard!”
Bubblegum Tate
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Oh man, Johnson has an amazing quip in the comments:
“[Wingnuts] are so post-modern they wrap around and become pre-modern.”
Mnemosyne
@Nylund:
I don’t think you read as closely as you think:
Morris specifically says that he’s accounting for overlaps, so really his lament is that white married women and white men over 30 were not sufficient to carry Romney over the finish line. But Morris knows that his readers will fill in “white” to complete his racist thought, so he doesn’t have to.
pluege
shorter DICK morris: ‘if only all those Americans hadn’t voter for obama romney surely would have won.
will republicans ever understand and admit that America is NOT a white supremacist state? nnnnaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!
Hal
Can I just say as one of “the blacks”, the ethnicity, not the people Donald Trump knows, I really hate the term “The Blacks.” It sounds like a bad SNL skit turned into a full length 2 hour movie.
Full Metal Wingnut
@Southern Beale: Well what really matters is what % the margin was, and it’s still higher.
kd bart
It’s Math Republicans Do to Make Themselves Feel Better.
Wag
Simple math require that we have to give Mr Morris his due. He doesn’t think that Obama’s winning voters should only count for 3/5 of a vote. Using the numbers above where he tries to take into account possible duplications (35% vs 43%, doing the math 35/43=81%), Mr Morris thinks that Democrats should count as 4/5 of a voter, not just 3/5, as the Founding Father’s would have had it.
Progress!!!!
TG Chicago
In another bit of innumeracy, Megan McArdle speaks on Wal-Mart:
I saw this via Sullivan. Unsurprisingly he failed to make the obvious point until a reader made it for him:
Exactly what I thought when I read the McArglebargle. Since when is $3k “far from life-changing” for someone on a limited income?
Ruckus
@The Moar You Know:
Gotta say, I’ve never seen a presidential loser vanish from sight as fast as Romney has. I think the entire party is ashamed and just wants to forget the election ever happened.
Sounds just like le bébé terrible, the actual president they want to forget.
Lojasmo
@Nylund:
He POINTS OUT these are not exclusive groups, but then DISCOUNTS his point. Read again, with more comprehension.
West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.)
@Roger Moore: Make that the white male (over 30) vote: The People’s Republic of Getoffmylawnia!
West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.)
I know we’re all dismayed that Morris is being paid good money to foist his nonsense upon an ignorant public, but I’m more tired still of Grover Norquist. I keep seein’ his big ol’ hairy moonface on the internet. Is there a photograph of that guy in which he perhaps smiling, or is he always going for the concerned sage look? The Don Johnson Miami Vice unshaven look is probably an attempt to diminish Norquist’s roundness of face, but it isn’t working.
Darkrose
@The Moar You Know: I especially liked his complete and utter lack of apology for trying to get the GOP to push black folks out of the Democratic coalition because Robert Byrd was in the KKK.
Calouste
Btw, the correct naming convention for this post’s subject would be Dick “Dick” Morris.
SiubhanDuinne
@danimal: Well you’re the one crying “racism” so that must prove that you’re the REAL racist, right? (I mean you and ABL, of course.)
/snark, and I feel awful that I even have to use the slash disclaimer
NonyNony
@TG Chicago:
McArdle needs to spend some time living on the income (and benefits) that a Wal*Mart worker makes for a while. It would do her a lot of good to get away from her privileged upbringing and see how a good-sized chunk of the country actually lives.
Better yet if it could be contrived to have her spend a few months living as a single mom on a Wal*Mart income.
? Martin
@TG Chicago: And it completely overlooks the {gasp} possibility that WalMart raises prices on a few items, such as the $148 32″ TV they were selling on Thursday evening.
? Martin
@TG Chicago: And someone should remind Megan that you don’t need to blow all $250 a month on pink himalayan salt. You can use it for other things, like gas and clothes.
Helen Bedd
Toesucker can do all the fancy slice and dice of various crosstabs, but i’ve got an easier explanation as to why the popular vote [and not the EC] was close and why Obama won.
Rmoney won the south by 15 to 16 points, while our President won the rest of the country 55-45. That adds up to Obama +3.
Roger Moore
@NonyNony:
How about until she adds more to society than an average WalMart worker?
different-church-lady
@Roger Moore: Forever is a long time.
AA+ Bonds
Well, Morris is a mercenary. He knows that the way to the hearts of his readers is through convincing them that somehow, a majority is a minority.
owlbear1
Shorter Dick:
“If it wasn’t for all those White Race Traitors, Romney would have totally won!”
Patricia Kayden
@NonyNony: What is the “married women” part of this?
I am a married woman, but 90+% of my kind (Black women) voted for President Obama. Morris should have specified “White married women” since no other group of women (married or single) votes in the majority for Republicans.
Patricia Kayden
@catclub: Interesting, but why doesn’t he acknowledge the fact that the racist Democrats from the South of yesterday left the Democratic Party in droves and became Republicans? I would laugh in the face of anyone who came to me with that “Democrats were racist 100 years ago” crap. Republicans are racist now and that’s much more relevant to me.
danielx
@The Moar You Know:
Seems to be a developing pattern; I’ve never seen a former president disappear like George W. Bush. Seems like the GOP really wants to forget his second term, at least, ever happened. Compare and contrast: Bill Clinton is treated like rock star royalty, Dubya has been treated like he’s got leprosy. What, he didn’t have any accomplishments worth touting? No? How odd.
Suffern ACE
Even if I pretended there is no overlap, I wouldn’t just add up the percentages of each group to get a rough estimate of Obamas margins. What a lazy ass. What exactly was he advising Clinton on back in the day?
Mark
A bit off topic, but let’s not forget that before the Civil War, slaves did not get 3/5 of a vote. They got 0 votes.
It was slave-holding southerners who wanted slaves to count as a whole person for purposes of apportioning congressmen, and northerners who wanted them to count for nothing (denying the southern states extra congressmen to “represent” their disenfranchised residents).