The New Silent Majority

Barack Obama has just been reelected president by a majority of the U.S. population. Although this comes as no surprise to those at MSNBC, I must point out that this win bucks a whole lot of conventional wisdom on polls and turnout. Liberal commentators, pundits, journalists and Obama campaign officials spent the entire month of October pointing to polls that Obama had slight leads in nearly all battleground states. The election results proved the liberals right. But that doesn't mean all the conservatives that claimed that the polls were wrong were deliberately trying to be misleading. In fact their claims had so much merit, it lead me to believe that it was the democrats that were living in Fantasy Land. During October, I looked further into it and it turns out the polls were based on a methodology that included the belief that even though independents were breaking for Romney, a massive turnout of democrats very similar to 2008 was going to make up the difference.

Conservatives had plenty of reasons to be skeptical. First of all 2008 was an historic election for the ages. Supporters of Obama were going to vote for America's first black president. There was so much hope in the air it was electric. The numbers of young, minority and women voters that showed up in 2008 was overwhelming compared to any election before it. People who never voted in their life wanted to be a part of history. Then there was the 2010 election. The newly formed conservative tea party turned out to oust huge numbers of democrats in the house and senate. It seemed to most experts that the election of 2008 was an anomaly. Conservatives were convinced that the polling methodology for 2012 was wrong.

But wait! There's more!

The conventional wisdom of polling statistics was not the only thing that made conservatives skeptical of a huge 2008-like turnout. There was also obvious visual clues as well. In the last month of campaigning, both candidates held many rallies, almost every single day. In the last week there were several rallies per day for both candidates. One of the big stories reported by reputable conservative news organizations both on television and on the internet was that there was a huge difference in turnout to the rallies of Obama verses the rallies of Romney. It was reported that the Romney campaign had to move his scheduled events to larger venues because of the overwhelming turnout. I heard crowds as large as 30,000 were driving in from hundreds of miles away to get in to see what they believe was going to be their future president. By the end of the campaign, Romney was calling it "a movement." At the same time it was told that the Obama campaign was struggling to scrape together a couple thousand people. Reports of half empty venues were all over the place. One conservative article claimed an Obama rally featuring a concert by Stevie Wonder managed to muster up only 200 people! It doesn't help that the liberal news organization were silent about rally numbers. So while it may not be scientific, the reported rally numbers really made many feel like the momentum, energy and excitement was definitely on Romney's side.

More anecdotal evidence:

The visual evidence was not limited to rallies. I live in a swing county of a swing state. A strong argument can be made that Hamilton County, Ohio elects presidents of the United States. We voted for Bush twice and Obama twice. That's where I live and work. I drive all over the county all day, every day. In 2000, yard signs were equally divided between Bush and Gore supporters. In 2004, Bush signs were much more numerous than Kerry signs. In 2008, Obama signs totally overwhelmed McCain signs. This year, Romney signs absolutely dominated Obama signs. I can't speak for the rest of America and what kind of support they display on their residences, but here it is generally loud and proud, and this year the louder support in a county that is a microcosm of the rest of the country was loudest for Romney.

Last but not least...

I am a chronic Yahoo! user. Don't get me wrong - do not think for a second that in my quest for intellectual punishment, my choice of torture device is in any way an endorsement of such a device. I have grown to love to hate Yahoo! and everything their editorial staff stands for. Once you get beyond that, I am hopelessly addicted to their comments section. This is not a new development either. I was a notorious troll on the old Y! Message Boards before it got shut down, gutted and transformed to Y! Answers. These days, the public gets their fix of trolling in the comments section of Yahoo's front page articles. Its extremely popular, and I became convinced over the years that you can use the overall attitude of the collective posts as a bellwether for predicting actions of Americans. For example, back around 2005-2007 I could truly tell that Bush's popularity was waning. The more popular posts (based on their ratio of thumbs up to thumbs down) were mostly anti-Bush posts, and the overall percentage of pro-Bush posts was getting smaller and smaller. Then of course we saw the landslide election of 2006 against Republicans. In 2008 the comments were mostly pro-Obama, or anti-Bush, which of course led to the huge Obama win coupled with the election of the Democrat super-majorty in Congress. In 2010, I saw slightly more comments on Yahoo of pro-tea party types. It was only "slightly" because Yahoo comments section have always been a safe-haven for liberals, as many of the most popular news sources online have become by that time.

Fast forward to October, 2012: Following the debates, the comments section of Yahoo has become more one-sided than I have ever seen them - but not for the liberals. It has been flooded with conservatives earning hundreds of thumbs-ups for pro-Romney and anti-Obama posts. As far as I was concerned, this alone was an indication of a landslide for Romney. There was also the incumbent presiding over the worst economy of our generation, the foreign policy missteps of Benghazi, and to put the icing on the cake, the last few days of the campaign included a Hurricane Sandy that was very quickly looking like a debacle for Obama.

All the conventional wisdom was pointing towards the polls being wrong. How could a majority of independents be for Romney while the overall numbers were showing Obama ahead? How could this be while everything I can see with my eyes and hear with my ears says that most people are going to vote for Romney? How was it that the polls ended up being right on election day despite the conventional wisdom of presidential elections in years past?

The New Silent Majority

The answer is that there were many millions of people who voted for Obama that never put up a yard sign. They either didn't ever log into Yahoo, or stopped posting comments. They were quietly waiting in the shadows and pounced on election day. The are the "Silent Majority". Wait, what? For those not familiar with the phrase, the Silent Majority has in recent history been that large group of politically silent people that largely voted Republican on election day. For more information on the old Silent Majority, click here. The group of Obama voters that proved the polls right on election day are "The New Silent Majority." The question as to whether or not this is an Obama phenomenon or whether it is the new norm for the Democratic Party will not become apparent until the election of 2014.

As I write this, I am listening to Rush Limbaugh express his opinion that the reason Romney lost was because of a lack of turnout of the Republican Base. As of right now, based on what I have said about rally turnout, "Mittmentum," the movement, etc. I am rejecting that claim. Conservatives were fired up about the possibility of ousting Obama and replacing him with anyone. While conservatives were skeptical of Mitt for a long time, his performance in the debates really truly excited conservatives. Besides, just one day prior, Rush was talking about how the election results were a trend, not an anomaly. I'm not writing off the theory, but if Rush is correct, then I would have to write another article explaining how so many indicators pointed to a huge conservative turnout, but it just simply didn't happen on election day. For now, you can just know that it was the New Silent Majority.