"Tweeners"

Baseball has it's own unique language which the un-indoctrinated might find confusing but for baseball people makes perfect sense. Being a baseball player, coach, fan my entire life I am well versed in baseballese and am constantly amazed at how baseball terms and situations can metaphorically explain life off the field.

One such example which in baseballese is often called a Texas Leaguer which is a "shallow" fly ball that "falls in" for a hit. Another lesser known term for this "pop up"is a "tweener" because the ball falls between two fielders neither of whom can quite catch it.

Much has been made of the fact that, to date, Romney did not receive as many votes as John McCain did in 2008. This may change as all the votes are counted but it is possible that he still might fall short and even if he does catch him it will be considerably less votes than most people would have believed possible given the population growth and the situation would have seemed to indicate. I do not wish to minimize the possible dire consequences that this failure of the Republicans to "get out the vote" in any way but I do wish to point out some not much commented on positives that have been overlooked in the discussion.

The first is that the vast majority of the two million or so people who did not vote for Romney did not, not vote, because he was too conservative. Chances are good that those who did not vote this time were just fed up with the "lesser of two evil" choice given them and provided with a more conservative candidate in the future they will come back into the foal. So unless the Republican Party doesn't change its ways which the Tea Party is in the process of doing, they will probably be reliable votes in the future. I suspect the missing votes are a combination of Ron Paul supporters and Tea Party members who could not stomach Romney.

What has not gotten nearly as much attention and which in fact is, in the long run, far more significant is the at present nine million voters who abandoned Obama this election compared to 2008. Again these numbers will decrease as votes are counted and finalized but regardless of what the drop off ends up being, they were people who simply could not pull the lever for Obama.

A small percentage of these voters were people who did not think that Obama had gone far enough to implement their progressive dreams but I suspect the vast majority of them were Democrats who were shocked at what their party was actually doing and had become. Not only that, there were probably far more of these people than even this large number would seem to indicate since many of these disillusioned Democrats actually voted for Romney.

Obama's nine million no-shows or whatever the number ends up being, are those who were so disappointed in Obama that they would not vote for him yet could not yet bring themselves to vote for a Republican. They are the "tweeners"

Where the no show Republicans are probably not "between" switching from being a conservative and becoming a libers, Obama's no-shows at least have the potential of switching sides.

In 1988 I supported Al Gore in his bid for the Democratic nomination, I know I was young and foolish and a life long Democrat from a family of Democrats. However by 2000 I voted for Bush to defeat Al Gore. In the nineties I became a "tweener" I could not vote for Clinton, but I wasn't going to vote for a Republican. I fell between the parties and neither one could catch me. I was, to put it in Obama speak, being transformed.

People rarely change ideologically overnight, it is a process but the process is usually started by events. For me it was the eighties, the Reagan Revolution. Although I could not identify the specifics of why I was changing my political thougt process, it was happening and by 2000 it was pretty much complete.

Those millions of former Obama voters are now in a process too, they are now questioning whether their old ideas about the Democratic Party hold true or not. They are susceptible to a conversion, in fact they are already in the midst of one. Whether they realize it or not or whether they fall back into liberalism's deceptive grasp, time will tell but the truth is they are probably more likely to move away from the Democrats than not for one simple reason, Obama won.

In 1980 Jimmy Carter received about five million less votes than he did in 1976, but he lost. Those voters who did not vote for him or switch to Reagan the true "no-shows" did not have to live with the fact that they could not stomach Carter but failed to do anything to stop his re-election. They did not have to live with four years of reminders that they chose the wrong guy once but did not vote him out the next chance they had, not so with the Obama no shows. For the next four years, people who knew that Obama was wrong for the country are going to have to live with him every day and watch while he continues to do what they had the power to stop and did not.

The only other president in history to get less votes and win an election was FDR in his third and fourth elections. So Obama is in pretty much uncharted waters, millions of people who once supported him are now having to live with consequences of their inaction and it is bound to have an affect.

Let me point out one last aspect to this drop off in turn out, in both parties. If the ethnic demographics were different in 2012 as opposed to 2008 it is not necessarily because more non whites voted, but rather because a large portion whites did not vote at all and by far the larger portion of whites that did not vote were Democrats. All those Democrats that did not vote for Obama are now officially "tweeners".