The next POTUS

[Captain Picard's Hair]

... same as the previous one.

[Tyyr]

Not a shock. I think everyone has really seen this one coming for about the last month.

[IanKennedy]

Shouldn't that be PotUS? I know it looks more like an accusation that an abbreviation but the "of the" is usually presented in lower case in the full version.

[McAvoy]

Yeah i think many knew it.

I just find it funny that I keep seeing the same complaints about Obama or Romney that you can find on funny pictures on Facebook. Seems like people use that as a reference.

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

Same as it ever was. Same as it EVER was...

[Deepcrush]

Not a shock. I think everyone has really seen this one coming for about the last month.

I think most people knew it when the GOP picked Ryan. At that point it was just a matter of how close could Romney get since he wasn't going to win.

[Mikey]

Democratic victory ALWAYS relies on high voter turnout in inner-city areas and lower-income demographics. What the GOP did was to present a candidate that galvanized those blocs into turning out... against him.

[Deepcrush]

That and the GOP didn't really secure its normal voting areas. A large part of the conservitive population is turning against the GOP in federal elections which is really hurting them. West Virginia, Virginia and Ohio turning against the GOP is a huge loss. The Armed Forces changing sides also really hurts them.

[Mikey]

Very true. Mitt Romney - former governor of Massachusetts - didn't carry Massachusetts. Colin Powell came in late with a ringing endorsement... for the Dem candidate. Ryan was divisive, and there was a publicly and undeniably fractious quality to some outspoken GOP members during the campaign. I don't think there was a Republican candidate available who could have overcome the self-inflicted wounds that the GOP was giving itself.

[Deepcrush]

The DNP and GOP both hold about 40% of the votes to each other. Normally they can promise that much commitment to their runners and then just reach for the independents and undecided voters. The problem for the GOP is that they lost a lot of ground in that area. Obama taking both Ohio and Virginia with West Virginia so divided that it changed hands over a dozen times in the final three hours. Florida, normally a GOP state is still out but looks to be swinging to the DNP again. If Obama and the DNP catch onto the trend and focus on any of the three strong GOP regions left (Great plains, Cotton country and Appalachia) the GOP could count itself out of elections for the next twenty to fifty years. The south as a whole is slow to change from any system that works and if Obama can come in with something better or helpful, the GOP will lose the region as a whole. To be honest, it wouldn't even be that hard for him to do.

[Graham Kennedy]

It's funny, but from reading forums and blogs it seems like a LOT of people on the right are quite shocked at this result. A lot of them were really convinced that Romney would win, even win by a landslide. They're a bit confused and weirded out by it right now. An article I saw talks about the phenomenon...

How Conservative Media Lost to the MSM and Failed the Rank and File
By Conor Friedersdorf

Nate Silver was right. His ideological antagonists were wrong. And that's just the beginning of the right's self-created information disadvantage.

Before rank-and-file conservatives ask, "What went wrong?", they should ask themselves a question every bit as important: "Why were we the last to realize that things were going wrong for us?"

Barack Obama just trounced a Republican opponent for the second time. But unlike four years ago, when most conservatives saw it coming, Tuesday's result was, for them, an unpleasant surprise. So many on the right had predicted a Mitt Romney victory, or even a blowout -- Dick Morris, George Will, and Michael Barone all predicted the GOP would break 300 electoral votes. Joe Scarborough scoffed at the notion that the election was anything other than a toss-up. Peggy Noonan insisted that those predicting an Obama victory were ignoring the world around them. Even Karl Rove, supposed political genius, missed the bulls-eye. These voices drove the coverage on Fox News, talk radio, the Drudge Report, and conservative blogs.

Those audiences were misinformed.

Outside the conservative media, the narrative was completely different. Its driving force was Nate Silver, whose performance forecasting Election '08 gave him credibility as he daily explained why his model showed that President Obama enjoyed a very good chance of being reelected. Other experts echoed his findings. Readers of The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other "mainstream media" sites besides knew the expert predictions, which have been largely born out. The conclusions of experts are not sacrosanct. But Silver's expertise was always a better bet than relying on ideological hacks like Morris or the anecdotal impressions of Noonan.

Sure, Silver could've wound up wrong. But people who rejected the possibility of his being right? They were operating at a self-imposed information disadvantage.

Conservatives should be familiar with its contours. For years, they've been arguing that liberal control of media and academia confers one advantage: Folks on the right can't help but be familiar with the thinking of liberals, whereas leftists can operate entirely within a liberal cocoon. This analysis was offered to explain why liberal ideas were growing weaker and would be defeated.

Today?

It is easy to close oneself off inside a conservative echo chamber. And right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's show are far more intellectually closed than CNN or public radio. If you're a rank-and-file conservative, you're probably ready to acknowledge that ideologically friendly media didn't accurately inform you about Election 2012. Some pundits engaged in wishful thing; others feigned confidence in hopes that it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; still others decided it was smart to keep telling right-leaning audiences what they wanted to hear.

But guess what?

You haven't just been misinformed about the horse race. Since the very beginning of the election cycle, conservative media has been failing you. With a few exceptions, they haven't tried to rigorously tell you the truth, or even to bring you intellectually honest opinion. What they've done instead helps to explain why the right failed to triumph in a very winnable election.

Why do you keep putting up with it?

Conservatives were at a disadvantage because Romney supporters like Jennifer Rubin and Hugh Hewitt saw it as their duty to spin constantly for their favored candidate rather than being frank about his strengths and weaknesses. What conservative Washington Post readers got, when they traded in Dave Weigel for Rubin, was a lot more hackery and a lot less informed about the presidential election.

Conservatives were at an information disadvantage because so many right-leaning outlets wasted time on stories the rest of America dismissed as nonsense. WorldNetDaily brought you birtherism. Forbes brought you Kenyan anti-colonialism. National Review obsessed about an imaginary rejection of American exceptionalism, misrepresenting an Obama quote in the process, and Andy McCarthy was interviewed widely about his theory that Obama, aka the Drone Warrior in Chief, allied himself with our Islamist enemies in a "Grand Jihad" against America. Seriously?

Conservatives were at a disadvantage because their information elites pandered in the most cynical, self-defeating ways, treating would-be candidates like Sarah Palin and Herman Cain as if they were plausible presidents rather than national jokes who'd lose worse than George McGovern.

How many months were wasted on them?

How many hours of Glenn Beck conspiracy theories did Fox News broadcast to its viewers? How many hours of transparently mindless Sean Hannity content is still broadcast daily? Why don't Americans trust Republicans on foreign policy as they once did? In part because conservatism hasn't grappled with the foreign-policy failures of George W. Bush. A conspiracy of silence surrounds the subject. Romney could neither run on the man's record nor repudiate it. The most damaging Romney gaffe of the campaign, where he talked about how the 47 percent of Americans who pay no income taxes are a lost cause for Republicans? Either he was unaware that many of those people are Republican voters, or was pandering to GOP donors who are misinformed. Either way, bad information within the conservative movement was to blame.

In conservative fantasy-land, Richard Nixon was a champion of ideological conservatism, tax cuts are the only way to raise revenue, adding neoconservatives to a foreign-policy team reassures American voters, Benghazi was a winning campaign issue, Clint Eastwood's convention speech was a brilliant triumph, and Obama's America is a place where black kids can beat up white kids with impunity. Most conservative pundits know better than this nonsense -- not that they speak up against it. They see criticizing their own side as a sign of disloyalty. I see a coalition that has lost all perspective, partly because there's no cost to broadcasting or publishing inane *beep* In fact, it's often very profitable. A lot of cynical people have gotten rich broadcasting and publishing red meat for movement conservative consumption.

On the biggest political story of the year, the conservative media just got its ass handed to it by the mainstream media. And movement conservatives, who believe the MSM is more biased and less rigorous than their alternatives, have no way to explain how their trusted outlets got it wrong, while the New York Times got it right. Hint: The Times hired the most rigorous forecaster it could find.

It ought to be an eye-opening moment.

But I expect that it'll be quickly forgotten, that none of the conservatives who touted a polling conspiracy will be discredited, and that the right will continue to operate at an information disadvantage. After all, it's not like they'll trust the analysis of a non-conservative like me more than the numerous fellow conservatives who constantly tell them things that turn out not to be true.

[Tsukiyumi]

That about sums it up.

[Tyyr]

The problem for the GOP is that they lost a lot of ground in that area.

*Waves Hand*

Don't even consider myself a Republican anymore.

It's funny, but from reading forums and blogs it seems like a LOT of people on the right are quite shocked at this result. A lot of them were really convinced that Romney would win, even win by a landslide.

Anyone who was convinced Romney was going to win in a landslide was just delusional. He might have won, MIGHT, but the way the electoral math breaks down made it so he would have to lock up all the usual red states and win just about every state that was up in the air to pull it off. He had long odds on just squeaking out a win much less breaking 300 electoral votes.

An article I saw talks about the phenomenon...

Yup.

Thanks Rush! No seriously, the movement that created Rush Limbaugh was the worst thing to happen to the Republican party in the last half century. It created a way for conservatives to shut out the other side and feed on itself. How did Birtherism survive as long as it did? It was sheltered. In an isolated community where people who loved the idea of him being a Kenyan that could constantly self reinforce that belief. It just kept growing, from Rush and talk shows to full fledged news networks to the point now where the conservative media is as large and the "liberal" one. It's possible for conservatives to just pick out the news they want to hear that reinforces their view points. Like any entertainment outlet the conservative press recognizes this and gives guys like Glenn Beck prime time TV slots. It all created one great big inbred group think that creates a environment where I'll be talking to otherwise rational adults and suddenly hear someone complain about the "Kenyan Muslim" in the white house with a completely straight face and have the other people around them just calmly nod like its fact.

I don't think there was a Republican candidate available who could have overcome the self-inflicted wounds that the GOP was giving itself.

The candidates are half the problem. Most of the GOP saw McCain as a RINO at best and Romney is... well he's a RINO as well. They tried their hardest to whitewash it but Romney isn't exactly one right in the Republican wheelhouse. The guy's about as liberal as you're going to find on the right side of the aisle and as exciting as a bowl of oatmeal. Are there really no charismatic, intelligent, and interesting candidates in the party? Are boring, stuffy, old white guys all the party's got left?

[Deepcrush]

Romney wasn't a washout for it, at least not right away. In fact, his being an aisle hopper could really have been helpful for the GOP if they had come out with a better or simply plain running mate for him. Someone so new that no one had ever heard of him and he hadn't had a chance to screw anything up. The GOP also failed to produce a good economic plan which is a must have for the New England, West & East coast states. Obama can point that the markets are recovering and jobs are coming back even if slowly. The GOP had nothing in mind other then "we'll spend more and raise taxes" in high revenue areas. Problem is those areas are New England, West & East coast which aren't going to want to pay out more in taxes.

[Mikey]

"Boring, stuffy, old white guys" are all the GOP can put up while keeping their centrist constituency happy.