Some Observations About the 2012 Elections You Won't Read Elsewhere
1. Mitt Romney improved on John McCain's net votes against Barack Obama in 47 out of the 50 states plus DC.
2. The states where Romney didn't improve on McCain's net are actually pretty interesting: Alaska (no sitting governor on the ticket), Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. None of those states were battlegrounds, but it is interesting that aside from Alaska and Maryland, the other three are pretty much Bible Belt territory. Oklahoma bills itself as the buckle of the Bible Belt and Romney did about 10,000 votes worse on net that McCain did in 2008.
3. Obama got fewer votes in 2012 than in 2008 in every state but Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland.
4. Although there has been a lot of gnashing over the fact that Romney got fewer votes overall than McCain this ignores the impact of Sandy. The states with the two biggest dropoffs in voting were New York (-23.5%) and New Jersey (-17.3%) ; if those two states had been average for dropoff in 2012, Romney would have had a net increase over McCain's total.
