Michigan: A Tie in the Number of Delegates

by Charles C. Johnson
As usual, the game’s rules have been misreported by our media. So what if Mitt Romney won the popular vote? Like the Scrabble player who boasts about the quality of words he is making and yet loses the game, this is simply not how the game of our politics is played.
While it is indeed the case that Mitt Romney won a plurality of the number of votes cast, and indeed, won more votes in 2012 than he did in 2008, he tied in the number of delegates awarded. It is that figure–the number of delegates awarded–that is the only figure that matters.
Have a look at the map here:

In other words, Santorum, if you break it down by congressional district, Santorum won five congressional districts controlled by Republicans and two controlled by Democrats, while Romney won four congressional seats controlled by Republicans and three controlled by Democrats. If you toss out Michigan’s 15th district (which was loss after the 2010 census because nobody wants to live in Michigan anymore) and don’t count the swing districts (which broke evenly) or the two very Democratic districts in Detroit that broke evenly, and average the partisan voting index of the districts won by Romney and Santorum, you get the following result: Santorum’s congressional districts were +2 Republican, while Romney’s were roughly +2 Democrat.  As Democratic areas tend to be more populous than Republican ones, this largely explains Romney’s victory.
This is important because it gives you a sense of how much of the appeal for Mitt Romney is in the states or areas that are the most Democratic. Given this break down, it’s easy to argue that Operation Hilarity fizzled. If it did, wouldn’t you expect more of the congressional districts controlled by Democrats to have voted for Rick Santorum? And yet that is not what happened.
As The Washington Post points out, this is because only 9% of Democrats voted in 2012. Though this figure is up from 7% in 2008, it is roughly half of the 17% of Democrats who voted for John McCain in 2000. In other words, it totally failed, most likely because the numbers of moderate Republicans or Independents outweighed the number of Democrats who bothered to vote.
The numbers of Romney’s victory then should give Romney cause for worry. He simply has not won Republican areas. Humorously, though, he’s now trying to claim that Santorum is the candidate of liberal Democrats in a new attack ad:

Of course, the implicit suggestion in this ad is that a bunch of Democrats in Detroit, one of America’s most liberal cities, know who is going to be a weaker candidate than Barack Obama, a president who, incidentally, has one of the lowest approval ratings in swing states. I have a hard time buying that for several reasons.
The Democratic Party has officially abandoned the white working class, as The New York Times reported. The white working class supported the Republicans in the 2010 election by a record-setting 63-33. It would seem, then, that this is fertile ground for the Republicans to make still more inroads and therefore win the election, but Romney has all but been written off by this key demographic of the 2012 elections.  If the economy is his salient issue, why is he doing so poorly among the people that would most benefit from the economy’s turn around? The white, non-college educated working class.
Once again, as elsewhere, Romney won those who had at least some college and those making more than $100,000 a year, while Santorum won those who had no college and make less than $100,000 a year. This is very bad news for Romney moving forward, and the signs of it have been clear ever since the beginning. In Florida, Romney won the suburban and urban areas. In South Carolina, he won the capitol and not much else. He has done very poorly among those he most needs.
Demographer Joel Kotkin points out that while cities continue to get larger, so too do the white exurbs. It could very well be argued that part of the reason that Democrats tend to be so hostile to “suburban sprawl” is that they are trying to water down the Republican vote by restricting the number of homes that can be built or purchased thereabouts.
Going forward, there will be a very serious problem for Mitt Romney in the Republican party. He’s running out of blue (or purple) states he will never win in a general election. His challenge will be to see if he can win a single Republican, non-Mormon-dominated state. Thus far, he hasn’t, and he is running out time to do a turn around of his own campaign. Unfortunately for Romney, he doesn’t seem to notice this problem.
For Santorum, his challenge is whether or not he can appeal to women, particularly white working class women. If he can, he will win the election. If he cannot, he will not. It’s really that simple. Indeed, had Santorum performed equal to how he performed with men, he would have defeated Romney on his home turf. Fortunately for Santorum, he does seem to know this, which was why he mentioned the three women that have been most present in his life–his mother, his wife, and his daughter.
To keep women from turning on Santorum, expect him to try to sure up endorsements from prominent Republican women, and perhaps the queen of the right, herself, Sarah Palin, whose very femininity and conservatism is a heady brew.