GOP hasn’t fallen off a cliff

[dballance]

2. When they're still able to muster 47% of the voters to vote for them

they have not fallen off a cliff or really lost much of anything. Romney was one of the most deeply flawed candidates in my memory and the anti-women, anti-imigrant messages the GOP was happy to keep repeating during the campaign didn't cause them that harmful a loss. If they'd lost 60 or 70 to 40 or 30 then perhaps we could say voters actually woke up. But they didn't really. Forty-seven percent of voters voted for Romney. In my math classes that still rounds up to almost half.

I would be very curious to see how the voting might have been different if we'd had a white Democratic candidate. All other things being equal I'd be willing to bet a white Democrat could have probably kicked Romney's lying ass in some of the South. Perhaps we'll see in 2016.