The question always was were polls accurate in telling us that the leftward move in the demographics of the electorate was real, that Obama had firmly in hand the "47%" who were gonna vote for him no matter what simply because he was liberal and black meaning that all he had to do was pry off a few undecideds in the middle, turn out his base and he'd have all he needed to win a narrow victory. We got our answer - we weren't gonna get a repeat of 1980 because demographics have changed. The frightening thing about this is that it's as if it didn't even matter at all how good a president Obama was [awful] or might be in the future [still awful one expects].
As depressing as all that is to contemplate the key thing to remember here is that Reagan could do what he did in 1980 because the demographics allowed him to overcome media bias - it's all about media bias as far as I'm concerned - the shift in demographics has so evenly split the electorate that republicans have lost a lifeline in the battle against a left wing media and the culpability of an indentured press. Going forward conservatives are gonna have to forge a strategy and the appropriate tactics for overcoming this liability, this threat. If you can't win without getting those soft votes in the middle and those votes are extremely vulnerable to being mislead or beguiled by media bias... well, what needs to be done should be obvious.
Which is why several months ago I mused that possibly only Christie had a chance of beating Obama - and that's not to fault Romney at all because I thought he was a good but not great candidate who ran a flawed but certainly good enough campaign - rather my point was that only Christie had the skill set, the personality to defeat media bias. Take Benghazi for example: the press abdicated its responsibility there because, one must assume, they knew if they pushed it the way they would have pushed it if Bush had been president, it would probably cost Obama the election; Romney had serval opportunities to take up the attack in lieu of the press failing to do its job but he declined - did he decline because he knew Obama would play the offended innocent, the press would play along for him [see Candy Crowley] and in the end Romney thought he couldn't therefore win that fight? Would Christie have felt compelled to make the same concession? I doubt it - not that that would have necessarily changed the outcome - the point is that given changing demographics conservatives will be increasingly vulnerable to the negative effects of media bias if they fail to adopt coherent strategies to defeat it and fail to nominate candidates with the personal skills, the broad appeal to overcome it.
