Obama Wins Florida - Electoral Count reaches 332 for Obama
Sunday, November 11, 2012
A Win is a win. Adding the state of Florida to your win column just makes the win more special, and brings the Presidents total and final electoral vote count to 332, compared to Romney"s 206. During the start of the night of the election, the results seemed gloomy for the President. At first glance, the President had just one state in his column, and Romney had many. But the ones that really counted ALL went to President Obama. When Ohio finally moved to the Obama column early in the night, the outcome of the night was known and the announcements started coming in that President Obama would be re-elected. He won with 50.01% of the votes cast and the difference between candidates were just shy of 74,000 votes in the state of Florida.
Why did it take so long for the state of Florida to give the results? The facts were that there were at least 4,000,000 absentee ballots to be counted, and with the race within a margin to go either way, then it was clear that the tally wouldn't be given the night of the election. In matter of fact it took until Saturday afternoon to get the vote count finally done.
It seems that every year the race seems to close to call for many campaigns, but this year, it was especially close, and the polls didn't seem to help much. Talk radio was entertaining, but you could let your fingers walk from one radio station to another and get a different result as far as polls. If you went to a station like KLIF sponsoring conservative talk show hosts bent on putting down the President and promoting the Republican candidate which not necessarily was their choice, you would hear that Governor Romney was ahead in the polls. If you listened to liberal stations, you would hear that Obama was ahead in the polls. At the end, the polls didn't matter. The electoral college that went past the magic number for President Obama was reached when he won the state of Ohio.
What is sad is that there were several possibilities that the election could have come down to the State of Florida as did in the past, and that would mean a time after the election that a winner could not be chosen because of absentee ballots. I'm glad that this did not happen for the 2012 elections, and that the electoral and popular votes went for President Obama, just as they did in 2008. Interestingly enough, knowing the facts of the actual voters after the election just gives you chills, knowing that if the same number of republicans would have come out and voted for their candidate as they did for McCain in 2008, there was a chance that Mitt Romney could be president-elect right now. Instead, millions of Republican voters stayed home this year. No-one knows the definitive reason why they did not come out and vote. Maybe it could be contributed to Hurricane Sandy that ravished the eastern coast during the early election cycles that kept people from voting. But maybe not, because the President won all of the eastern border states except North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia this year as Romney won that state of North Carolina by a margin of 51% to 48% a state that he won in 2008. Obama's prior successor George W. Bush won North Carolina twice, but it has traditionally gone Republican. Maybe it could be because of the long lines of voters, where in many cases it would take hours before you could reach a voting booth. People just didn't have the patience to wait, or the desire to possibly be told that they could not vote because they did not have a proper I.D. Rules of the Republican that they were imposing on their voters worked against them this year.
What does this mean for the Republican party in 2012, with such a devastating loss across the board, including Senate seats and House seats lost to the Democrats? Listening to Conservative talk shows after the election, you can hear the blame game. One thing is for sure, the Republicans do not have a clear path for the 2016 elections. The only thing they may have going for them is that President Obama will not be running in 2016. Since the ratification of the Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1951, no person may be elected President more than twice, and no one who has served more than two years of a term to which someone else was elected may be elected more than once. Upon the death, resignation, or removal from office of an incumbent President, the Vice President assumes the office. The President must be at least 35 years of age and a "natural born" citizen of the United States.
So just as there was a long list of candidates in 2012 for the Republicans who wanted to run against President Obama, there will be a long list of Democrats that will bid for the Democratic nomination. The question is can the Republican party that is clearly in disarray at the present time come up with a truly solid Conservative leader that the voters can stand behind. For that matter, who do the Democrats have in mind? Is it too early to start looking for another candidate for the 2016 election right now?
