Tom Scocca notes that 88 percent of Romney voters were White:
[W]hite separatism was not enough to break up the actual Obama mandate. Obama's support was so broad that if white people had simply split 50-50, rather than favoring their ethnic candidate, the president would have won 58 percent of the popular vote.
Jennifer Victor tallies spending, using data available on election day:
These totals represent a nearly equal game between the candidates. However, this may not be a fair comparison. The totals for the individual candidates are money raised, not spent (as of Election Day), and the IE total includes money from the Republican primaries. Also, money spent by the parties on behalf of their standard bearers are not included here.
Some evidence suggests that the Obama team slightly outspent the Romney team. But for now, it is safe to conclude that the election was not "bought."
Brian Beutler examines how Republicans lost the Senate. In short:
[I]n state after state, the GOP electorate nominated candidates too conservative to credibly challenge even unpopular Democratic incumbents.
Silver's projection has become more favorable for Obama:
If the national popular vote winds up roughly tied, instead of favoring Mr. Obama by two points or so, then Mr. Romney could claw back to win Florida, Colorado and Virginia, and perhaps Iowa and New Hampshire. But Mr. Obama’s lead in Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada and Pennsylvania is clear enough to withstand some underperformance in the polls, and his margins in the polling averages there have converted into a victory on election night a very high percentage of the time historically.
In order for Mr. Romney to win the Electoral College, a large number of polls, across these states and others, would have to be in error, perhaps because they overestimated Democratic turnout. It’s this possibility, more than the chance of a successful hail-mary in a state like Pennsylvania, that accounts for most of Mr. Romney’s remaining chances of winning the Electoral College.
Wonkblog and Daily Intel have rounded-up predictions from various pundits.
The Economist looks at which party has better balanced our books over the long term:
Since the end of the second world war, Democratic presidents have been considerably more successful than Republican presidents at keeping a tight grip on the nation's finances. Democrats have presided over reductions in the debt burden, on net, while Republicans have led in periods with net increases in borrowing.
Why Obama has his work cut out for him:
Mr Romney's response to the allegation that Republicans are the party of debt may be that no postwar president has presided over as large an increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio as Mr Obama. Mr Obama would respond that much of the debt attributed to him is not his fault. He would have a point. The deep recession he inherited likely added some 10-15 percentage points to the debt-to-GDP ratio, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Fair or not, the rise in debt over his term will make it difficult for Mr Obama to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility he might otherwise enjoy as a Democrat.
Tom Holbrook finds that the GOP brand is still tarnished:
[T]hroughout this campaign period the Democratic Party has been viewed more positively than the Republican Party. In fact, there is not a single poll in this series in which the Republican party registered a net positive rating, and not a single case in which the net Republican rating was higher than the net Democrat rating. The average net rating for the Republican Party in this series is -13, whereas the average for the Democratic Party is +.3. To be sure, the net rating for the Democratic Party is sometimes in the negative, and the gap toward the end of the series is not as great as it was in the wake of the Democratic convention, but it is clear that the Democrats hold an advantage on this front
Steven Taylor adds:
The bottom line is: we know a substantial number of voters (in the high 40s to low 50s) will vote for Romney, the Republican, next week. However, we also know that partisan ID in polls does not fit those numbers. As such, it is clear that a lot of people who will vote Republican do not wish to be called Republican for whatever reason. The above graph gives us some context: the net view of the GOP at the moment is negative, and it is not just because Democrats view the party unfavorably (because there are not enough Democrats to create a net unfavorable outcome).
Dylan Matthews tallied weather-related fatalities:
As Wonkblog’s Brad Plumer explained in a Monday post, it’s hard to attribute single weather events to climate change. But clearly something is causing the across-the-board rise in weather-related deaths, and global climate change, which worsens hurricanes and promotes heat waves and tornadoes, may be a prime culprit.
Fallows sees parallels between the global warming debate and the smoking causes cancer debate:
Of course no one can prove that this storm was "caused by" climate change and global warming. But the increasingly frequent occurrence of "unusual," "extreme," and "once per century" weather events — heat, cold, drought, flood — is in keeping with all warnings about the effects of climate change (as explained here). I'm not arguing the entire climate change case now, and don't have special standing to do so anyway. I am saying that this reminds me of the mounting evidence about smoking and health, when I was a kid — the medical conventions my father went to in the early 1960s were full of smokers, those a decade later had practically no smokers — or about environmentalism generally in the 'Silent Spring' era. Denialism continues, until all of a sudden it is irrelevant.
