More critique of Stevens' piece from FirstRead:
*** Explaining Romney’s loss -- Obama was black and poor people voted overwhelmingly for him: Indeed, the entire piece appears to rationalize that the campaign’s strategy was right. (And for the reporters who received emails from Stevens during the campaign, the tone was very, very familiar.) In the op-ed, Stevens essentially suggests Romney lost because poor people overwhelmingly voted for Obama. “On Nov. 6, Romney carried the majority of every economic group except those with less than $50,000 a year in household income. That means he carried the majority of middle-class voters.” Yet that analysis ignores that those making less than $50,000 represented 41% of the electorate in 2012, and many of those people probably would argue that they’re in the middle class. Stevens also seems to argue that Obama won because he’s a black man whose campaign and party raised $1 billion. “[H]e was a charismatic African American president with a billion dollars, no primary and media that often felt morally conflicted about being critical. How easy is that to replicate?” But that also leaves out the fact that Romney was a white man who had a famous name in American politics and whose effort also raised close to $1 billion. By the way, there’s a lot of contradictory evidence to suggest the president carried the middle -- the swing suburban counties. In every swing state, the largest major suburban county tipped to the president.
*** Obama’s victory was more decisive than Bush’s in ’04: And here’s one final observation about the 2012 race. Per the excellent work by the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, Obama’s national lead over Romney continues to expand as votes keep on coming in. It’s now Obama 50.9%, Romney 47.4%. That’s a bigger (and more decisive) margin than Bush’s victory over John Kerry in 2004 (which was Bush 50.7% and Kerry 48.2%). What’s more, the president’s lead has grown to close to 3 points in Ohio, 4 points in Virginia and 6 points in Colorado. One doesn’t win Colorado by six points without winning swing voters; there isn’t a big-enough Democratic base to make that argument.
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