Presidential Campaign

Republicans, fresh from their electoral defeat, are considering their own legislation to compete with the DREAM Act. Sen. Kay Hutchinson (R-Texas) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) have put forward the ACHIEVE Act, similar to the alternative that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) worked on last summer and which would offer a untenable type of legal status for undocumented youth. However, a significant difference between this bill and the original DREAM Act is that the ACHIEVE Act does not even guarantee a path to citizenship.

The DREAM Act is already conservative in nature and has even gathered support in the past from prominent conservative leaders, including Senator Hutchison herself, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

This election was far different from what we saw in 2008. With primaries on both sides of the aisle leading up to the presidential race, 2008’s election was a long one. The hype surrounding both parties for endless months – not to mention the historic opportunity to elect a woman or an African American – caused young people to pay attention even if they weren’t trying to. They became hooked, and they registered, voted early in primaries and caucuses, and volunteered. And, with its energy and size hard to ignore, the Millennial generation played a critical role on Election Day in 2008;  it was ‘the year of the youth vote.’

But in 2012, there was no extended primary that explicitly targeted young voters. Instead, just endless supplies of money funding negative ads that were enough to drive the average TV-watcher insane. The negativity didn’t end there either. Campaign stops and televised debates saw a brutal rehashing of past mistakes and harsh accusations. As a result, there were far fewer yard-signs and t-shirts and outward hype from young people. And the media and politicos read this as a sign that young people would not vote. This election wasn’t exciting or “cool” enough to motivate young people to go out and vote. That’s where they were wrong. You don’t have to be a cheerleader to go to the game.

Perhaps the most overused and misunderstood term in politics is the word mandate.

Does simply winning an election give the winning candidate and party a mandate? Not automatically.

Does the size and scope of the win determine the power of the mandate? It can. By any measure President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats won a decisive victory.

Not only did Obama win 332 electoral votes to Mitt Romney’s 206, the president won three million more total votes. As only the fourth president in 70 years to win two elections by more than 50 percent, Obama joins an elite group which includes Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.

The gender gap first appeared in modern presidential elections 32 years ago.

In 1976, three years after the Roe vs. Wade abortion decision, Democrat Jimmy Carter won both women and men by an identical 2 points. Then, in 1980, something happened: Republican Ronald Reagan carried women by 2 points and men by a much wider 19 points, for a 17-point gender gap. In Reagan's 1984 landslide, he won both sexes: women by 12 points and men by 25 points, for a 13-point gap.

Barack Obama’s re-election is not a mystery; it’s a message:  A message to the GOP to shape up.
 
Less than a week ago, my home state of Florida added 29 more electoral votes to the president’s total, making the result an official thumping. Few predicted such a rout, especially the Florida outcome where even the most influential Democrats privately confided they thought the President would lose the Sunshine State.
 
As a conservative and someone who has been part of winning and losing campaigns in America’s ultimate swing state, my view is the Republican Party still has an opportunity to reclaim electoral success, but to do so it must be willing to improve.
 
The to-do list isn’t long, but achieving each is prerequisite to our future success:

For people who voted for Mitt Romney in the recent election, they are amazed that he lost because they don’t personally know many people who voted for him. Likewise for Obama supporters, they are puzzled that the margin of victory wasn’t higher, because they have few close acquaintances who voted for the other party. Like many recent presidential elections, this year’s was close in the popular vote. It is close because the candidates contort their positions to appeal to broadest spectrum of the electorate and there is an absence of viable third-party alternatives which would garner a significant portion of the voters. The reason that many find the closeness of the election amazing is that over time, we have segregated ourselves geographically into such like-minded clusters, that we are seldom exposed to people with differing political views.

With President Obama being re-elected, now is the time for the president and Congress to get back to work. The 2012 campaigns have ended and now it is time to stop the name calling, bickering and double talk and instead to work together to solve problems that our country faces.

Both President Obama and Congress need to roll up their sleeves and deal with the hard issues that our country faces. That means keeping our country from going over the fiscal cliff by embracing Simpson-Bowles and cutting our nation’s deficit as soon as possible.

It has always been said that in polite company one should never talk about politics or religion. Today, let's do both.

There was a lot of discussion throughout this election about religion. Would born-again Christians vote for Mormon Mitt Romney? Would Barack Obama lose white Catholic support? Would Obama turn off Jewish voters because of his handling of U.S.-Israeli relations?

From exit polling, we can shed light on these issues:

President Obama unquestionably owes his historic victory to an overwhelming 71 percent of the Latino vote. In 2004, George W. Bush won 44 percent of Hispanics. Four years later, John McCain, the author of an immigration reform bill, took 31 percent of Hispanics. And this year, Romney captured only 27 percent of Hispanics. Last Tuesday’s result shows that being against the DREAM Act and immigration is no longer good politics for the Republican Party. In fact, for the past eleven months, undocumented youth from across the nation rallied to expose the extreme position of Mitt Romney on immigration in swing states, including his threat to veto the DREAM Act.
 
But the election is over and it’s time for genuine leadership on immigration and the DREAM Act: it begins not only with the president, but also with Congress, specifically Republicans.

The elections are over, and the finger-pointing is in. Most factors that contributed to Obama’s advantage and conversely Romney’s weakness have been thoroughly rehashed in the media. Obama’s more “human” personality, natural appeal for African-Americans, Asian-Americans (the Hawaii connection) and Latinos (immigration), stronger than expected national security and foreign policy record (except the Benghazi embassy tragedy, Bin Laden was killed on his watch – and that’s all that matters to most voters), record-breaking fundraising (being able to out raise businessman Romney is no small thing) and superior “ground-game” operations.