An Electoral Landslide

Now that Obama has been awarded Florida, the final tally for the 2012 election is
Obama: 332
Romney: 206

This is an electoral college landslide. Obama's margin of victory was so large that even if he had lost Florida, Virginia, and Ohio--the three biggest of the nine swing states--he still would have won the presidency with 272 electoral votes.

Nate Silver points out that the Democrats have a structural advantage in the electoral college. See the chart below.

This chart shows that the Democratic electoral coalition is going to be difficult for the GOP to overcome. If you think about John Kerry and Al Gore, neither of which were particularly strong candidates, they lost the electoral college by the smallest of margins, 266 and 255 respectively (270 is required for victory). Al Gore actually won the popular vote.

By way of contrast, the last two presidential elections, when the Democrats had a good candidate, have been blowouts with 100+ electoral vote margins.

My own view of this is that the GOP message has become so extreme that they are now a regional party of the South and plains states. Prior to 1992, the GOP won California routinely. California is now as reliably Democratic as North Dakota is Republican. Obama won California by a 20% margin. Unfortunately for them, the solid GOP states tend to be sparsely populated. The ten most heavily-leaning GOP states only have 59 electoral votes. The ten most heavily Democratic states have 129 electoral votes.

What conservatives fail to appreciate is that their message--while successful at strongly galvanizing a segment of the population--has also had the effect of alienating another (larger) segment. As a national party, the GOP is virtually extinct in the Northeast and West Coast. That gives Democrats 170 electoral votes as a starting point. Add to that the states in the upper Midwest (Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin) along with Pennsylvania and Illinois, which have all gone Democratic in the last six election cycles, and you are only 24 votes shy of victory, with most of the remaining states having a Democratic lean.

The GOP can still be successful winning Congressional seats in mid-term elections when the turnout is lower and with a demographic make-up more sympathetic to conservative candidates. However, the Democratic party has close to a lock on the presidency as far as the eye can see.

I will predict now that if the Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton in 2016, she will be elected by margins similar to, if not exceeding, Obama's. I say this because she is likely to hold on to most of the Obama coalition (Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, single women, and upscale women) while doing significantly better among working-class whites. Remember, she convincingly defeated Obama in the 2008 Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania Democratic primaries. The only group she is likely to do worse in is with young people. If Hillary serves two terms, it will be 2024 before the GOP gets another shot at the presidency, and by then the demographics of the country will make a win by the GOP--at least as currently constituted--nearly impossible.

If the party is smart, it will moderate. Given what I have read from the conservative press since the Romney debacle, this doesn't look likely.