The only question for Republicans is: Which candidate can win in the states Mitt Romney lost?
Let’s start with the fact that before any votes were cast on Election Day, Democrats had already won between 90 and 98 percent of the black vote and between 60 and 75 percent of the Latino and Asian vote. If Republicans don’t win a majority of the white vote, they will lose.
If there is any hope, it is in Trump alone. Donald Trump will do better with black and Latino voters than any other Republican. But it is with white voters that the electoral map really opens up.
The Republican Party, which wasn’t about to commit suicide, would know that. But Stuart Stevens, the guy who lost a presidential election that could have been won in 2012, says that the Republicans can’t get one more white vote — and the media is trying to convince the GOP that he’s right.
Stevens says Romney exhausted all white voters and lost, so he says Republicans are looking for the “lost tribes of the Amazon” in hopes of winning more white votes: “In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 56 percent of the white vote and won a landslide victory in 44 states. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 59 percent of the white vote and lost 24 states.”
Apparently no one told Stevens about the 50-state Electoral College. The national white vote is irrelevant. Presidential elections are won by winning states. (Only someone who got their ass kicked by running a candidate who is extremely electable would not know that.)
Excluding third parties and dividing it into a two-person race, Mitt Romney won 88 percent of the white vote in Mississippi but only 40 percent of the white vote in Massachusetts. What is the point of talking about his national percentage of the white vote given such a disparity?
Romney lost to Obama in five key swing states: Maine (42 percent of the white vote), Minnesota (47 percent), New Hampshire (48 percent), Iowa (48 percent), and Wisconsin (49 percent). He narrowly defeated Obama’s white vote in other significant swing states — Illinois (51 percent), Colorado (52 percent), Michigan (53 percent), Ohio (54 percent), and Pennsylvania (54 percent).
Increasing the white vote in these states opens up multiple paths to victory for Trump.
If Trump wins just the same states as Romney, but adds Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois—where Romney’s white vote share was lower than his national average—Trump would win with 280 electoral votes. (Romney was not an ideal candidate in the industrial Midwest.)
Trump could lose each of those states and make up for it by winning Minnesota and Wisconsin—where Romney actually lost among whites. Or he could lose two of those states but add victories in places outside the Rust Belt where Romney’s white vote was also below average, such as Colorado, Iowa, Maine, and New Hampshire. (In 1992, Ross Perot finished second in Maine to George Bush.)
I haven’t even mentioned Florida, where Trump recently routed Stuart Stevens’ dream candidate, Marco Rubio, an incumbent senator—and Cuban!—in a 20-point rout. Republican voters outnumbered Democratic voters in the primary by more than half a million votes.
If Trump wins Florida, he will only need to win two or three of the 10 states where Romney lost the white vote or won a smaller share of the vote than the national average.
Stevens’ analysis assumes there will be no modern voters—and, I repeat, there is no other mammal on the North American continent who knows less about winning a presidential election than Stuart Stevens.
It’s like we can only share a pile of 2012 voters. If you didn’t vote in 2012, you can’t vote in 2016! Use it or lose it, buddy.
It doesn’t work like that.
Trump says he’ll bring in a lot of modern people, just like he did in the primaries. In the Florida Republican primary, for example, Trump got almost half a million more votes than Romney did in 2012—about half a million modern people voted. Trump may be wrong, but it’s crazy to say he can’t bring in modern voters.
It is impossible for any Republican candidate, except Trump, to win a single state that Romney lost. Ted Cruz’s banal speaking style is terrifying to anyone who disagrees with everything he says. He is a less likable, tougher version of Romney. Every other Republican is, in one way or another, a less attractive version of Romney.
Maybe 50 years of Third World immigration means it’s too slow and even Trump can’t win. But it’s an absolute certainty that every other Republican will lose.
