When presidential hopefuls lose their home state
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney sits in the stands with his wife Ann Romney (L) before start of a game between Boston Celtics and the Atlanta Hawks on May 6, 2012 at TD Garden in Boston, Massachusetts.
/ Jim Rogash/Getty Images
Should he win while losing the solidly blue Bay State, Romney will become the first man to enter the White House despite losing what could reasonably be considered his "home" state since Woodrow Wilson pulled it off in 1916. (No thanks to you, New Jersey.) Of course, home state is a slippery concept: Romney was born and spent his childhood in Michigan and owns homes in New Hampshire and California. He also has strong ties to Utah.
In 2008, President Obama easily won the state he represented in Congress - Illinois - and his birth state of Hawaii. His Republican opponent, John McCain, also easily won his home state of Arizona, which he represents in the Senate. (McCain was born at a Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father was a Naval officer.) Republican George W. Bush twice won the state he is most associated with, Texas, where he served as governor prior to becoming president. But Mr. Bush actually lost the state where he was born and where he attended Yale University, the blue-state bastion of Connecticut.
Connecticut wasn't entirely kind to Mr. Bush's father, either: George H.W. Bush lost the state in his 1992 reelection bid, despite his father, Prescott Bush, having been a senator there. And while George H.W. Bush twice won Texas, where he spent much of his adult life and was elected to the House, he twice lost his birth state of Massachusetts.
The voting mess in Florida in 2000, meanwhile, would have been irrelevant had Democrat Al Gore managed to win his home state of Tennessee. Had Gore not narrowly lost the (largely conservative) state to George W. Bush that year, he could have lost the Sunshine State and still become president. Gore represented Tennessee for 16 years in the House and Senate.
In 1960, Republican Richard Nixon lost the electoral vote to Democrat John F. Kennedy 303-219, though Kennedy barely won the popular vote. The electoral results were almost worse for Nixon: He barely won California, the state he represented in the House and Senate from 1947-1953. Nixon's margin in the Golden State was only about 35,000 votes, or roughly half a percentage point.
While Nixon narrowly avoided home state humiliation, the same cannot be said of 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern. McGovern, who won only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, lost his home state of South Dakota despite having easily won reelection to the Senate there in 1968.
The list of nominees who lost their home state is not short -- and it mostly includes politicians who failed to win the White House. Some other (relatively) recent presidential nominees on the list: Democrat Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota in 1968, Democrat Adlai Stevenson of Illinois in 1952 and 1956, and Republican Thomas Dewey of New York in 1944.
For Romney, the pain of an almost-certain loss in Massachusetts - where polls show the president with a double-digit lead - would be at least somewhat offset by a win in Michigan, where Romney's father was both governor and a prominent auto executive. While Romney is vowing to contest Michigan, the state's streak of voting for every Democratic presidential nominee since 1988 doesn't bode well for him. His chances are boosted somewhat by lingering goodwill in the state for his family, which prompted Romney to run ads before the Michigan Republican primary stressing his biography. With polls showing Mr. Obama with only an extremely narrow lead in Michigan, Romney made a point of stopping in the state on a bus tour two weeks ago.
"I anticipate coming back to Michigan a great deal and fighting a campaign to win in Michigan," he told The Detroit News last month. And while his primary concern is obviously the state's 16 electoral votes, there's little doubt that he would love to avoid joining the list of nominees who couldn't win either of the states they could plausibly call home. As Romney said in an ad during the GOP primary: "Michigan's been my home - this is personal."
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You made a mistake regarding 1968--Hubert Humphrey carried Minnesota that year.
We wonder if his father was Manuel Noreiga? Thank heavens he didn't get elected. He'd be the "Junta Presidente". LET"S GO VIRAL
1 The most important would be his agenda for outsourcing your retirement money to Bermuda and your current employement to India.
2 Second is his religon which has been described as a cult by those who have left it in disgust.
3 Third is the republican mantra of victory at any cost including criminal acts from murder to simple burglary.
4 Then there is the republican do as I say, not as I do mentality. Remember one of Romney's heros is former President Richard, "if I do it it's NOT illegal" Nixon whose VP also went to JAIL, Spirew T Agnew.
5 Boehner's House of Representitives which has FAILED to act in a respectable manor and has publicly stated it's refusal to do anyhting but put another republican in power regardless of who gets hurt in the process.
6 If the former is not enough to make you sick of republicans, remember "W" and Dickie and the 6 TRILLION dollar defict they ran up just to iliminate one man who "TRIED to kill my dad"!
Ask yourself one question, CAN WE AFFORD ANOTHER DISASTER OF REVENGE POLITICS????
"The CBO has more then double it's project cost for the first five years to 1.762 trillion with with revenue of 510 billion for a cost of 1.2 triliion over 5 years."
LOL! Talk about blowing smoke and an inability to use simple math!
Sure enough, here's CBO: "the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of just under $1.1 trillion over the 2012-2021 period—about $50 billion less than the agencies' March 2011 estimate." You would get the opposite impression reading smokey's ridiculous post!
He either didn't notice or didn't choose to include the CBO's warning that this analysis does "not encompass all of the budgetary impacts of the ACA because that legislation has many other provisions, including some that will cause significant reductions in Medicare spending and others that will generate added tax revenues."
It doesn't include the Medicare cuts, or many of the tax increases, that pay for the legislation. It's like reading only the "outlays" side of the budget and ignoring the "revenues" part. Of course that would make the deficit look huge.
But those other parts of the bill aren't a secret. They're mentioned right there in the analysis. Quoting again: "CBO and JCT have previously estimated that the ACA will, on net, reduce budget deficits over the 2012-2021 period; that estimate of the overall budgetary impact of the ACA has not been updated."
One other thing that's confused some people like smokey, is that this estimate is looking at a different timeframe than the original estimates. The CBO's first pass at the bill looked at 2010-2019. But years have passed, and so now they're looking at 2012-2021. That means they have two fewer years of implementation, when the bill costs almost nothing, and two more years of operation, when it costs substantially more.
But it also means that the included cuts and taxes, which grow with time, are larger. As you extend the analysis, the bill both costs more and saves more, and the savings grow more quickly than the costs.
"Smokey are you too blowing smoke? The CBO estimate of 1,252 trillion is for eleven years, not the "1.2 trillion" you state for five years."
Yes, either smokey is just outright confused or blowing smoke!
That being said, if you donate money to Romney, you may as well flush it down the toilet.
"OBAMA is losing Ohio, Florida, Arizona, Indiana, Michigan and Virginia."
LOL! Here's what the ultra-conservative Washington Times says:
Obama leads Romney in poll of three key states
President Obama leads presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the three battleground states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, where voters approve of the president's new immigration policy and rate the candidates about even on handling the economy, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2012/jun/27/obama-leads-romney-poll-three-key-states/
"for the leader of our country to have been stripped of his right to practice law in his home state"
LOL! Gee, another rush limbaugh dittohead, bringing back some more long-ago debunked right-wing propaganda and forwarded e-mail lies!
Fact is, First Lady Michelle Obama requested her law license to be placed on "inactive status," and President Obama had no need for an active law license for the work in which he was engaged, so he chose not to maintain it, so he "voluntarily retired" his law license.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/lawlicenses.asp
http://factcheck.org/2012/06/the-obamas-law-licenses/
********************
If that's the best the right-wingers can do -- bringing-up 2008 debunked political attacks and lies -- they're in serious trouble!
Polling Data
Poll Date Sample MoE Obama (D) Romney (R) Spread
RCP Average 6/4 - 7/1 -- -- 47.4 44.0 Obama +3.4
Rasmussen Tracking 6/29 - 7/1 1500 LV 3.0 44 46 Romney +2
Newsweek/Daily Beast 6/28 - 6/28 600 LV 4.0 47 44 Obama +3
Gallup Tracking 6/24 - 6/30 3050 RV 2.0 47 44 Obama +3
Democracy Corps (D) 6/23 - 6/27 1000 LV 3.1 49 46 Obama +3
FOX News 6/24 - 6/26 912 RV 3.0 45 40 Obama +5
NBC News/Wall St. Jrnl 6/20 - 6/24 819 RV 3.4 47 44 Obama +3
Bloomberg 6/15 - 6/18 734 LV 3.6 53 40 Obama +13
Associated Press/GfK 6/14 - 6/18 878 RV 4.2 47 44 Obama +3
Pew Research 6/7 - 6/17 1563 RV 2.9 50 46 Obama +4
Reuters/Ipsos 6/7 - 6/11 848 RV 3.4 45 44 Obama +1
Monmouth/SurveyUSA/Braun 6/4 - 6/6 1152 LV 2.9 47 46 Obama +1
See All General Election: Romney vs. Obama Polling Data
Notice, the only poll Robme is leading in is Rasmussen, which we all know is owned by the GOP!
President Obama leads presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the three battleground states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, where voters approve of the president's new immigration policy and rate the candidates about even on handling the economy, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2012/jun/27/obama-leads-romney-poll-three-key-states/
Mitt Romney was an awesome governor and he did wonderful things for this state.