2012 U.S. presidential election



By the power invested in me by this giant bald bird, the president shall not be the shiniest of two turds!

The 2012 U.S. Presidential Election took place on Tuesday, 6 November, 2012. Democratic President Barack Obama won a second term after defeating Republican challenger Mitt Romney. The nearest third party challenger in terms of votes was Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson, albeit he still did very bad.

Romney promised to buy more ships, Obama believed we had enough ships. That was literally their only disagreement.

The economy
The years leading up to the 2012 election were an absolute economic shitstorm that helped lead to a Democratic landslide in 2008, growing worse with the eurozone crisis.

The wars
Contrary to every election over the past 60 years, the Republicans couldn't attack their opponent for being "soft" on national security. The reason being that Obama was one of the most hawkish Democrats, with major victories such as the killing of Osama bin Laden. Combined with the increasing dislike of the Afghanistan War in the public and its future end date, foreign policy was not a major issue, unlike previous elections.

God, guns, and gays
Social issues are often more important when the economy is healthy, and white Christians can go back to telling other people how to live. Romney, a former social liberal, once claimed to be more for gay rights than Ted Kennedy but later edged himself to the right on social issues.

Health care
The major provisions of Obamacare would not come into effect until 2014 and a major SCOTUS case that could help define how people view his strength as a president, ultimately upheld the law in a 5-4 decision.

Romney passed a very similar health care bill while governor of Massachusetts. During the health care debates of 2009-2010, he strongly advocated for such a system to be instated nationally, making it difficult for him to attack the President's own health care plan. (Republicans still hate him for that.) Of course, this didn't stop Romney from criticizing Romneycare Obamacare and hoping nobody noticed.

Primary challengers
No notable Democrats came forth to challenge Obama for the nomination, although anti-abortionist Randall Terry, formerly active in the Constitution Party and who had also run for office as a Republican, entered the Democratic primaries against Obama mainly in order to run graphic pro-life ads. He ran strongest in Oklahoma and carried several counties. Likewise, a handful of other obscure primary candidates had strong showings and carried a number of counties in Arkansas, Louisiana, and West Virginia. One such candidate, convicted felon Keith Judd, got a whopping 40% of the West Virginia primary vote and won 10 of the state's counties – all while serving a 210-month sentence in federal prison in Texas. "None of the above" ran strongly in Alabama and Kentucky. But those are all states where Obama is unpopular among some rank-and-file Democrats, many of whom are social conservatives, and there were no serious threats to his renomination.

Primary challengers
No one actually liked him, although his programmers have learned well how to simulate human emotion.

Romney never really captured the hearts of the Republican faithful. His eventual defeat was the deathrattle of the Neocon/"establishment" wing of the party, allowing the gibbering lunatics to take over. His massive war chest, however, meant that his eventual triumph in the primaries was never in doubt. Starting in the summer of 2011, a number of fringe candidates enjoyed a few weeks as the frontrunner: Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and even Rick Santorum positioned themselves as the "not-Romney" of the moment. Of the challengers, Ron Paul, with a fervent base of followers disconnected from GOP orthodoxy, survived the longest; he never actually suspended his campaign for some reason.

Libertarian Party

 * Gary Johnson - official nominee. Former Republican governor of New Mexico.

Green Party

 * Jill Stein - official nominee. Physician.

Americans Elect
There were several candidates attempting to win the Americans Elect nomination which was to have been conducted entirely online. On May 15, 2012, Americans Elect announced they were declining to nominate anyone, declaring no candidate had met the threshold for support.

Constitution Party

 * Virgil Goode - official nominee. Former U.S. Congressman from Virginia, who was in Congress as a Democrat, an independent, and lastly a Republican. What was yet another party switch to him?

Prohibition Party

 * Jack Fellure - official nominee. Topping the list of reasons why you should have voted for Jack Fellure is "My Presidential Campaign Platform is the Authorized 1611 King James Bible. God Almighty wrote that Book as the supreme constitution and absolute authority..." and you know you don't want to read any more.

Assorted oddities

 * Rocky Anderson, former-Democrat, mayor of Salt Lake City, running on his own Justice Party ticket.
 * Roseanne Barr, entertainer, was the nominee of the California-based Peace and Freedom Party with activist Cindy Sheehan as her running mate.
 * The Reform Party-nominated Andre Barnett, a candidate no one has ever heard of from a party nobody remembers anymore.
 * Depending on your state, you could have seen candidates on the ballot from the Socialist Party USA (Stewart Alexander), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (Peta Lindsay), the Socialist Workers Party (James Harris), the Socialist Equality Party (Jerry White), and the Freedom Socialist Party (Stephen Durham); as was usual with such dust-ups between the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea, nobody cared.
 * The Communist Party USA, as per their policy since the Soviet Union stopped their funding, refused to run a candidate and endorsed Obama.

Results
People will long remember Mitt Romney’s politically tone-deaf attack on half the nation’s population for being losers, leeches, and moochers because he accurately articulated the right-wing worldview.

In general, the problems with Romney had to do with who he was, not how he campaigned. In 2012, the scars of the recession were still fresh, and a guy whose net worth was $250m and who had come up through Bain Capital was going to be a hard sell regardless. Add to the fact that his career up to that point had been as a centrist governor in a blue state, and his positions were closer to Pelosi's than Boehner's.

Romney campaigned relatively well, with no major missteps aside from the 47 percent thing. But he just wasn't the kind of candidate that was going to beat Obama in the first place. He changed his position multiple times on social issues, and much of his campaign relied on the assumption that the economy would stay stagnant. Because of how complex the economy is, this essentially left his campaign up to chance, which can be a major problem.

Adding insult to injury, he had conspicuous bank accounts in several tax havens and was sitting upon years of tax returns. While he did release summaries of the other years, none of these disclosed his effective tax rates, a major sticking point against his campaign. While VP nominees usually "balance out" a ticket (like a fiscal conservative running with a religious conservative), Ryan spelled doom for votes in (at least) Florida as he was a former Randroid and wasn't particularly known for his social conservatism either, therefore costing Romney 29 crucial electoral votes. His proposal to voucherize Medicare wasn't popular across the political spectrum; Romney's plan for Medicare was nearly identical as well.

And never — ever — try to make "we are the 53 percent" a talking point. And defunding PBS. And pissing off the entire United Kingdom.