I read google headlines, and I don’t recall seeing his popular vote percentage in the past week. In years gone by, this was reported rather quickly. Maybe I just missed it. At any rate, I hunted up the voting and I did a calculation. I first leave out the candidates from the minor parties. Obama got 62.6 million and Romney got 59.1 million. This 3.5 million difference sounds like a lot, but percentage wise Obama got 51.4 percent of this major party vote. If we count all the others, he got 62.6 out of 123.7, which is 50.6 percent.
To me, that’s very slim. It’s not an endorsement. It’s not a mandate for anything. It’s really a painful lack of enthusiasm for either candidate, meaning voters are in pain and can’t generate high approval of either man.
This slim margin is what happens in quite a few presidential elections.
8:16 am on November 14, 2012
