Category Archives: Romney

Don’t like the election results? Have a Mulligan!

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As the last votes from election 2012 trickle in, people on both sides of the political divide have moved on from their initial reactions to the election towards planning for the future.  But the questions of could-have should-have still linger in many people’s minds: could a change in effort or focus have switched the results?

To answer that, it’s good to know how close the election really was.  We all know how many votes separate the two candidates, but apart from finding 3.5 million more declared, dedicated Romney voters, what would have changed the outcome?  There’s a lot of what-ifs that people will play in their mind, and most are impossible to quantify.  But one set of what-ifs are fairly easy to model: what if the demographics of the electorate had changed?

For example, what if the african-american vote had been lower? With enough fewer votes, Romney would have won:

Click on picture to enlarge

About 4 million fewer african-american voters, and Romney could have won.

Want to play with the demographics yourself? You can!  Just visit my Election Mulligan web page:

http://socialseer.com/apps/mulligan

You can test such things as changing the male/female balance in the votes, adding in more rich voters or removing poor voters, seeing what happens if more latinos vote, or reducing the youth vote.  See what it takes to put Romney in the White House (if that’s your goal) or see how really hard it would have been for Romney’s Get-Out-The-Vote efforts to overcome Obama’s impressive campaign (if you like what happened)!

It’s fun, fast, and easy,  And you may be surprised how hard it would be to change the election.

The data for this app is based upon election results updated to 11/21 and exit polls conducted at the time of the election.  Note that exit polls are subject to error, and the results of this app are purely hypothetical.

A new low for Twitchy as they unleash cyber bullies on high school kids

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Recently, a group of high school kids were the subject of repeated abuse on Twitter, all for their political views.  Your reaction to this might be to sigh in resignation that this is just another case of regrettable, but not uncommon cyber-bullying.  

But there’s a strange difference in this case: The people abusing these kids had never met them and had no personal or geographical connection.  Instead, the people did this at the behest of a right-wing web site that presented a list of kids as suitable targets for attack.  The fans of that web site obliged by heaping scorn and ridicule onto the children.

You might think that savaging random high school kids for their political views is something all adults would know is inappropriate behavior.  But not for some of the fans of Twitchy.com, a website run by right-wing conservative pundit Michelle Malkin.  For the past few days her fans have been sending nasty tweets to high school and middle school kids, some as young as 13 years old:

The casus belli for this? The kids fell victim to a rumor that a president Romney would ban tampons.  Like a million other people who fall for strange rumors, the kids’ reactions varied from anger to puzzlement.  But for Twitchy, this was just too golden of an opportunity for conservatives to show how much smarter they were than the liberal high-schoolers.

In their post on the subject, Twitchy set the agenda by demonizing the kids as liberals who had reading comprehension problems and then listed the tweets from 30 of them, complete with handy buttons for Twitchy readers to reply to any of the kids. It was one-stop shopping for the bullies: here’s your message, here’s your list.  And the Twitchy readers took great advantage of those buttons: they launched well over 300 nasty tweets.  One girl alone received nearly 60 foul messages from the Twitchy community.

The reaction of the teen-age girls (all but 4 of the victims were girls) to the anger directed at them varied widely.  12 of them either deleted the tweet they originally sent or locked their accounts.  But then Twitchy users taunted them for doing so.   Many of the others started fighting back with the bullies.  But conservative condescension was overflowing as the Twitchy bullies always strove to get the last word of ridicule in.

Without any sense of irony, the Twitchy thugs chided the minors for not being “classy” (a suggestion from Twitchy itself, of course). As if the thugs had any sense of class (or independent thought) at all…

Yes, the kids did get tripped up by a dumb rumor.  Yes, some of them expressed their anger in, to borrow a phrase from candidate Romney, an inelegant fashion.  But that is never license for strangers from across the internet to bully school kids.  It is immoral and immature.  This behavior by Twitchy was unacceptable and I call on them and their leader, Michelle Malkin, to apologize to each and every one of the kids.  

Otherwise, it should be clear to all that Malkin does not believe in taking personal responsibility for her own actions.

Have you been massively attacked on Twitter for your political views?  Here’s some advice.

Obama vs. Romney on Twitter — Ryan VP Pick week (8/12/2012)

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With all of the excitement over Todd Akin, it’s easy to forget that last week was all about Romney picking Paul Ryan as his running mate.  But it was a busy week nonetheless, and it’s interesting to look at how it was played out on Twitter.

The first thing that stands out is that the number of tweets mentioning each candidate was roughly the same.  Both received about 1.9 million mentions on Twitter.  Romney may have fewer followers, but he’s just as hot of a topic.

For both of the candidates, about 45% of the tweets were retweets, while the rest were not (or were modified in the process).  There’s a lot of people expressing their opinions out there.  And what were those opinions?

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