Election 2012

Pastor John MacArthur, who before Election Day warned that the Democrats are an “anti-God party” that has “made the sins of Romans 1 their agenda,” delivered a post-election sermon in which he declared that President Obama himself is a judgment of God. “We have the President, we have as a judgment from God, that is a judgment from God, he is an evidence of God’s judgment,” MacArthur said, and went on to doubt Obama's Christian faith and reiterate his claim that God is abandoning America to “sexual sin.”

We have the President we have as a judgment from God, that is a judgment from God, he is an evidence of God’s judgment. Because of Romans 1, God has given us over, ‘when those who know God glorify him not as God and do not like to retain God in their knowledge,’ which is what the Democratic platform said originally, get God out. By the way that’s a big change, four years ago McCain and Obama interviewed at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, both affirmed to be Christians, both affirmed to believe in Jesus Christ, that all went by the board and God was removed four years later because that wasn’t going to be popular this time around. So that kind of an accommodating religion has been unmasked. But the bottom line is Romans 1 says that if you do not retain God in your knowledge, if you do not glorify him, his wrath is unleashed. It’s talking about the cycle of history, Acts 14: God allows all the nations to go their own way. We’re going our own way; we’re going the way of our own choices. When the wrath of God is in motion, God gives them over—this is his wrath in motion—to sexual sin, that’s what we’ve got, sexual sin which is rampant. Over fifty percent of adult women are single and men as well, this kind of single life with promiscuous behavior everywhere is what this generation wants. That’s an evidence of wrath: the smashing and crushing of the family. Then the next one, verse 26, he gave them over to homosexuality. Now we are not only tolerant but advocates of that. Then he gave them over to a reprobate mind and that includes murder and all kinds of other crimes, which would include abortion.

He also argued that gay marriage and abortion rights will grow the size of government and persecute the church.

I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future there are less and less and less freedoms that people in America enjoy, right now they are willing to make that exchange for two reasons: they are willing to make it number one for the sake of money in their pocket and number two for the sake of immorality. If the government will let them have free sex, homosexual marriage and abortion, they are fine, they are okay with that. As we pointed out to you before the election when you have a platform of a party being remove God, affirm free sex and government provided contraception, homosexual marriage and abortion, when that’s the platform you know how far that nation has gone into immorality. And when the people vote it into power again, that either means they advocate that kind of life or they are indifferent to it as long as you keep giving them what they want. So there is a real tipping point I think that’s happened in our country. I don’t mind the darkness getting darker, I don’t mind the illusion of morality going away, I don’t mind the darker environment in the sense ‘that darker the night the brighter the light.’ But the church has to step up and be the church and proclaim the Gospel and confront the culture, that’s what we have to do. And when we do that what’s going to happen is persecution. They are already talking about hate speech and the categories of hate speech are going to escalate as the immoral country begins to try to defend itself and isolate itself and not face the reality of its immorality.

While Obama had a larger popular vote and Electoral College margin than George W. Bush, who claimed to have a mandate after he won re-election in 2004, now Republicans keep insisting that Obama doesn’t have a mandate because his election victory was too thin a margin. For example, while Dick Morris predicted that Mitt Romney would win a 325 electoral vote “landslide,” he then said Obama’s 332 electoral vote victory was merely a “squeaker.”

J.T. Young in the Washington Times today makes the case that Obama’s win wasn’t all that great because if you play around with the numbers and reduce the turnout numbers from Democratic-leaning groups like women then Romney would’ve won! Plus, the conservative share of the electorate was up in 2012 and Ronald Reagan posted huge margins when he ran for president so Americans must still be looking for Republican leadership, or something. 

Multiplying exit-polling participation percentage by preference percentage gives a good approximation of what the Kerry or Gore electoral impact would be on these groups so crucial to Mr. Obama’s victory. The average drop in support for Mr. Obama in 2012 from the higher of either Mr. Kerry or Mr. Gore among the five groups is 2.4 percent. Delete women from the calculation, and the average decline is 2.8 percent — almost enough to have allowed Mr. Romney to win by Mr. Obama’s 2012 popular vote margin.

Even the decline in votes for Mr. Obama by 18- to 29-year-olds compared to Mr. Kerry or Mr. Gore — 2.2 percent — is still more than enough to flip the popular vote to Mr. Romney. The declines in other demographics — blacks (2.4 percent), Hispanics, (2.8 percent) and liberals (3.7 percent) — are far greater.

Furthermore, vote totals for both Mr. Kerry and Mr. Gore came against George W. Bush, who hardly racked up Reagan-sized Republican margins.

…

Republicans also retain a real ideological advantage. Exit polling showed conservatives made up 35 percent of voters in 2012 and went 82 percent for Mr. Romney — hardly a conservative favorite. Liberals made up 25 percent of 2012 voters — their highest level among the past four elections and 3 percent more than in 2008 — going 86 percent for Mr. Obama. That means Republicans need only a little more than one-third of the remaining Independents to win, while Democrats need a bit less than two-thirds.

The American Family Association’s Buster Wilson even had a post-election rant arguing that even though Obama won the election 51-47 percent, Romney tied him in geography and therefore Democrats don’t have a mandate. “There’s an awful lot of red there,” Wilson claimed. He even wondered if Harry Reid is mentally unbalanced because he said that Democrats had a mandate to raise tax on top-earners.

Of course, since Democrats typically lose the rural vote, if we were simply to judge election mandates according to the colors on maps then Democrats will almost never have a mandate.

Steve Deace on his radio show yesterday was flummoxed that Obama won re-election while capturing just 22 percent of counties. Ignoring the fact that county size has little to do with population rates, he maintained that because Romney carried far more counties than Obama, America still has a conservative majority but freedom-hating liberal elites have “infiltrated the population centers” and ruined everything.

“If we fought this like the Revolutionary War was fought at times where the Red Coats stood on a line and the Colonials stood on a line and they just fired at each other, we would overwhelm them in sheer numbers,” Deace gloated, “we would steamroll them.”

What has happened here is we’ve been outflanked. Enemies of freedom and liberty, what they have done is infiltrated the population centers so that they run the editorial boards of almost every major newspaper in your city, they ran the government school board in almost every major city in America, they run even things to the point like the art center, who is on the board of your city’s art center? The statists are, the secularists are, the progressives are. They are running—they have outflanked us. If we fought this like the Revolutionary War was fought at times where the Red Coats stood on a line and the Colonials stood on a line and they just fired at each other, we would overwhelm them in sheer numbers. First of all, most of them don’t believe in guns, that’s one advantage. The other thing is we would overwhelm them in sheer numbers, we would steamroll them, I mean they could not defeat our sheer numbers. But what has happened is the enemies of freedom and liberty have outflanked us, they have been strategic in their thinking and that’s where they have concentrated their resources. So we are a mile wide but an inch deep, they are the exact opposite, they are about a foot wide and a mile deep.

Basically, Obama can only claim to have a popular mandate if he wins the least populated areas of America.

The American Spectator's founder, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., was a guest on the American Family Association's "Today's Issues" broadcast this morning to explain how the thesis of his recent book, "The Death of Liberalism," was still valid despite the recent election results on the grounds that President Obama is not a liberal but rather a socialist. 

In Tyrrell's view, Obama's win was just a demonstration of the fact that conservatism has big victories but then reaches a plateau before going on to even greater victories.  So while the 2010 midterm elections were proof that America is a conservative nation, the 2012 election results were just a temporary plateau before the 2014 midterms, which will be another blowout win for conservatives.

But AFA's Tim Wildmon had a simpler explanation of why President Obama was re-elected:  because he is black.

After President Obama’s huge victory over Mitt Romney, conservatives are already trying to spin the results by insisting that his big win does not mean that Americans favor the agenda he actively campaigned on. For example, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said that voters actually elected Republicans “to be in charge” and resist tax increases while Weekly Standard columnist Fred Barnes claimed Obama “hardly has a mandate for anything,” like his tax policy, because it was a “status quo election.”

Naturally, Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI) told Tony Perkins last week on Washington Watch Weekly that President Obama and the House GOP may not come to a tax deal before the fiscal deadline because he fears that the Obama administration “is going to misinterpret this past election and say, ‘well we campaign on increasing tax rates, not just revenues but increasing tax rates, and maintaining our spending.’” Indeed, Obama did make raising taxes on high earners a top campaign priority and both post-election polls and exit polls found that 60 percent of support raising taxes on income over $250,000. But apparently, Huizenga believes that House Republicans, who actually received fewer votes than Democratic House candidates, get to decide for Obama how to interpret his victory.

Perkins: I think you’re right, no one really knows what will the effect of that be. It could actually have a—it’s certainly not going to have a positive effect upon the families that are paying that increased taxation—but in terms of the cuts that may be the only way we get to real cuts.

Huizenga: And that would be sad, frankly, that would be horribly sad, tragic and once again demonstrate how we don’t have the courage of our convictions. We know we need to go further, faster, when it comes to controlling our spending. I’m afraid that this administration is going to misinterpret this past election and say, ‘well we campaign on increasing tax rates, not just revenues but increasing tax rates, and maintaining our spending.’ That’s why I think you saw [AFL-CIO president] Richard Trumka and others all trot to the White House and extract these blood oaths that no reforms to any of the entitlement programs are allowed to be on the table and all these other things, and that’s just not reality.

Steve King stopped by The Janet Mefferd Show yesterday where he dismissed claims that a major reason Mitt Romney lost is due to his lopsided defeat among Latinos. According to King, it wasn’t that Romney did a poor job in winning over Latino voters; it’s that he wasn’t able to turn out enough conservatives to the polls.

King: John McCain got 31 percent of the Hispanic vote and Mitt Romney got 27 percent, so it dropped off four points between McCain and Romney. Romney didn’t reach the low water point; the low water point was 1996 with Bob Dole who got only 21 percent of the Hispanic vote. So when you look at the balance of this and you think, why didn’t Mitt Romney win the election? There are a whole number of other things. A lot of Republicans and conservatives didn’t turn out. Just plain constitutional conservative were not motivated in numbers as one would’ve expected, even compared to the McCain race.

So King thinks that Romney lost because dedicated conservatives didn’t bother to show up in a presidential election in which right-wing leaders put anti-Obama hysteria into overdrive and warned that Obama’s re-election will literally destroy America?

Let’s see.

According to exit polls from this election, 35 percent of voters identified themselves as conservatives. That number was 34 percent in 2008 and in 2004. While the percentage of self-described conservatives who turn out for presidential elections is rather stable, Latinos have steadily increased their share of the electorate as their population continues to grow.

King and Mefferd later agreed that working on immigration reform with Democrats is pointless as it won’t help the GOP win any votes because, in King’s words, “Democrats will find a way to hand deliver citizenship papers along with a great big check.”

Mefferd: How in the world do you out-left the left anyway? If we go to the left on amnesty, do you think the Democrats are going to sit still and just go ‘oh I guess that they’re more caring than we are’? It’s a zero-sum game. I don’t know how in the world the Republicans expect to get votes when the Democrats are already farther along than we are.

King: There’s no possible way. Whatever we might say we are going to do, reduce the enforcement of the rule of law, waive the rule of law, Democrats will find a way to hand deliver citizenship papers along with a great big check from money borrowed from the Chinese.

If King really thinks it is best for the GOP to maintain their hard line stance against immigration, he may want to ask his fellow Republicans in California how that worked out for them.

The folks at VCY America regularly promote all of the insanity posted on WorldNetDaily by its senior reporter Jerome Corsi, broadcasting his claims that President Obama’s wedding ring (yes, his wedding ring) transmits “secret communications” to Muslims and also publicizing Corsi’s “scoop” that Obama is secretly gay. Yesterday, VCY America’s Vic Eliason interviewed WND editor Joseph Farah, who claims that Obama won reelection due to voter fraud because his campaign accepted money from foreign donors (it didn’t) and stuffed ballot boxes in urban precincts (also not true). After ranting about massive voter fraud while not pointing to any real evidence of it, Farah then talked to Eliason about what he considers the all-too-real possibility of Obama undermining the Constitution in order to serve a third term.

Eliason: Interesting on Fox this morning, there is somebody promoting that there is a possibility if certain things happen that the President could be in for a third term, I got chills.

Farah: Listen, if you don’t believe in the Constitution and you’ve got a President who is not even eligible under the Constitution to serve, anything is possible, isn’t it? See the difference with the United States of America is that we’re supposed to be a country under the rule of law and that starts with the Constitution and that’s the most important law we have. And yet we ignore it every single day in Washington, every single day. Most acts of Congress are unconstitutional; we’ve gotten to that point. And the President has no—, he thinks we have a living Constitution that could mean whatever he wants it to mean. So hey, I wouldn’t rule it out.

He went on to claim that America is “on the brink” of losing “elections in the future” because of all the (non-existent) voter fraud and Obama’s re-election. He even took one last dig at Gov. Chris Christie for working with President Obama on relief efforts following Hurricane Sandy: “Unfortunately, instead of turning to God he turned to Obama for help, that’s the problem that we have in America.”

Farah: I don’t believe there is any way we are going to overturn this election because of what I’m telling you now, but what I am concerned about is this country, its future, elections in the future. We are very near the point, I believe, where elections won’t matter anymore. When elections don’t matter anymore, that means you don’t matter anymore, your rights don’t matter anymore. We’re on the brink of that. That’s why it’s important for us to make a lot of noise about this and demand reforms be made.

Eliason: The tipping point. I tell you we need to pray for our country. As we are facing the next four years, I was listening to some of the secular news this morning, they were talking about Armageddon.

Farah: They recognize it. A lot of things coming together at once, super storms and all these kinds of things, and it makes even the disbelievers believe, doesn’t it?

Eliason: You know I was on the air on our morning show talking about 2 Chronicles 7:14, but oftentimes we forget 13 and 15, verse 13 talks about the penalties and God’s judgment, and it talks about the locusts and the pestilence. I made a comment that morning just warning people that this may be God dealing with us, considering the storms and all of the things that are happening. I turned on the radio as I left the studios and here was Chris Christie and out of his mouth came, ‘I’m looking for the locusts and the pestilence.’

Farah: Unfortunately, instead of turning to God he turned to Obama for help, that’s the problem that we have in America. It’s a problem that we have in Israel, for that matter, Israel relying on its own strength and America’s strength for its survival and so forth.

It has been two weeks since President Obama was re-elected and Mat Staver and Matt Barber do not seem to have gotten over it yet as they dedicated a recent program to lamenting that America has re-elected the "most liberal, socialist, anti-liberty, anti-Israel, anti-life, anti-marriage, anti-religious values, anti-religious freedom, anti-free enterprise and pro-regulation president in American history" and, in doing so, has brought God's judgment upon itself by "adopting sin as official public policy": 

On today's "Faith and Freedom" radio program, Mat Staver insisted that Americans in general still oppose marriage equality, despite the recent election results in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington and basically blamed Mitt Romney's refusal to campaign on the issue for the losses, as well as his own election loss.  

Staver said that had Romney campaigned on the issue, his support would have gone up as would support for the anti-marriage efforts before blasting conservative pundits who are now saying the GOP needs to distance itself from the social issues culture war, declaring "I'm fed up with people on Fox News, whether it's Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly; they think they just know everything": 

Samuel Rodriguez has appointed himself to be the spokesman for all Hispanic-Americans, telling Republican leaders that Latinos are just itching to vote for Republicans if only they put a greater emphasis on their anti-choice and anti-gay positions while moderating their rhetoric around immigration.

During an interview on BreakPoint, Rodriguez described a meeting with Karl Rove where they predicted that the majority of Latino voters will back Republicans, a political prognostication that has been proven very wrong, and found it completely inconceivable that any Christian would support Democratic candidates over Republicans. He reasoned that the GOP “provoked the Hispanic community to go and vote for a party that does not affirm the values of life and the strengthening of marriage that Hispanics hold as sacred values” by not supporting immigration reform during Bush’s second term. “The Democratic platform does not resonate or reflect the core values of the Hispanic-American community; that’s not anecdotal that is a matter of quantitative fact,” he said.

But as we’ve noted before, a majority of Latinos support a woman’s right to choose and marriage equality.

He went on to say that Latinos (and African Americans) are backing Democrats by wide margins because “we vote our ethnicity” and “vote our cultural heritage rather than our Christian worldview,” contradicting his claim that Latino culture makes them Republicans.

The Democratic platform does not resonate or reflect the core values of the Hispanic-American community, that’s not anecdotal that is a matter of quantitative fact. Every single survey, even the recent Barna survey, reaffirms that finding. The fact of the matter is, the disconnect exists because of the rhetoric. Forty-four percent of Hispanics supported George W. Bush in 2004, forty-four percent. Karl Rove and I sat down and we predicted in 2006 that in 2008 fifty-two percent of Hispanics would go GOP, and for at least a generation that number would continue to go up. Then came immigration reform, and at the end of the day that sort of ‘we don’t know whether this party really wants us’ provoked the Hispanic community to go and vote for a party that does not affirm the values of life and the strengthening of marriage that Hispanics hold as sacred values.

…

I have to say this to ethnic communities: putting President Obama aside, the African American and the Latino community, we suffer from what I call vertical myopia. That is to say that many of us go to the voting booth and we vote our ethnicity, rather than our Christian worldview. I find that to be a problem, as a believer, as a follower of Christ, as a born again Christian, I find it to be a significant problem biblically and theologically, when we vote our cultural heritage rather than our Christian worldview.

Rodriguez also claimed that Obama’s second term will bring about a “greater erosion of our religious liberties” and even charged that under the Obama administration, “Christians that stand up for biblical marriage will be continued to be labeled with a de facto sort of federal endorsement as bigoted and homophobic” if they do not “surrender Christianity on the altar of political expediency.”

I think we’re going to see greater erosion of our religious liberties. I think we’re going to see those Christians that stand up for biblical marriage will be continued to be labeled with a de facto sort of federal endorsement as bigoted and homophobic. I think the war on the biblical doctrine of marriage will continue to increase. At the end of the day, it’s going to prompt the Christian community to say: is this the generation that will surrender Christianity on the altar of political expediency or will we activate or engage in a prophetic posture?