One of the more lopsided predictions of this year’s presidential election in Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s favor came from Fox News Channel’s Dick Morris, who on repeated occasions declared Romney would win in a landslide.
As it turned out, Morris was wrong and Obama won handily with a sizeable lead in the Electoral College. On Wednesday’s broadcast of FNC’s “Fox & Friends,” Morris said his landslide prediction had become his “mudslide” and explained where he went wrong.
“I think that the reason the prediction I made was wrong, is that I was criticizing the polling because I said that it reflected the same turn out model as there was in 2008,” Morris said. “And I said I thought that was one-off a pair, that it would not continue and that was not going to be the permanent turnout model for the United States. And I was wrong.”
Voter turnout in 2012 saw with more blacks, Latinos under-30 voters than he had factored in. Morris warned the GOP that it has to figure out how to woo those voters.
“We are now in a turnout model that is totally different than we’ve ever had,” Morris said. “Blacks are now 13 13 percent of the vote, not 11. Latinos are 10, not 8. And people under 30 are 19 and not 17. Previous numbers were the ‘04 model and I thought it would return to that. They didn’t. They stayed at the ’08 model, despite a lack of enthusiasm for Obama.”
He continued: “So what this is saying is this is the new America — this isn’t your father’s America. And the percentage of single women, minorities and voters under 30 is so large at this point that unless the Republican Party fundamentally changes its appeal to those voters, it can never win an election.”
Morris added Obama already had an insurmountable lead among those key demographics prior to Election Day.
“The point is by the time you take African-Americans, Latinos, under-30 voters and single white women and add them together — Obama is leading the election before you count the first vote with 40 percent of the vote to ,like ,13. You have to win two-third of the remaining vote to win. And Romney almost did you, but you can’t.
Morris continued: “And if this candidate in this economy against this opponent couldn’t win an election with this electorate, nobody ever can. And what the Republican Party needs to do is to stop trying to run in the face of the demographics, but start appealing to them and start revising some of its priorities and its positions in order to reach that vote — because that vote is here to stay.”