# 2012 Presidential Election [[Barack Obama]]'s reelection over former Massachusetts Governor [[Mitt Romney]] (Republican), the private-equity executive who had founded [[Bain Capital]] and had earlier governed Massachusetts as a moderate Republican who signed the state's mandate-and-exchanges health insurance law (later the operational template for the Affordable Care Act). Obama won 332 to 206 electoral votes, 51.1% to 47.2% in the popular vote — a smaller margin than 2008 but a clear majority, the second consecutive Democratic popular-vote majority since 1944-1948. The campaign produced several memorable moments: Romney's secretly-recorded "**47 percent**" remarks at a May 2012 Florida fundraiser ("There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what... who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims") that surfaced in September; Romney's October 16 debate line "**binders full of women**" in response to a question about gender pay equity; and the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens, which became a sustained right-wing media focus throughout the post-election period. ## Result - **[[Barack Obama]]** (Democrat) — 332 electoral votes, 51.1% popular (65,915,795 votes) - **Mitt Romney** (Republican) — 206 electoral votes, 47.2% popular (60,933,504 votes) - Total: 538 electoral votes - Turnout: 58.6% ## Right-wing relevance The 2012 election is one of the most extensively-postmortem'd Republican defeats in modern American political history. The Republican National Committee's March 2013 Growth and Opportunity Project report — universally known as the [[RNC Autopsy]] — concluded that the party needed to broaden its appeal to women, racial minorities, and younger voters; needed to support comprehensive immigration reform; and needed to update its messaging on cultural issues. **[[Donald Trump]]'s 2016 campaign explicitly rejected every recommendation in the autopsy**, ran on the opposite approach (anti-immigration, base-mobilization, cultural-traditionalist), and won. The 2012-to-2016 reversal is one of the cleanest examples in modern American political science of party-strategic-consensus being completely overturned by a successful insurgent campaign. The 2012 election also confirmed the **demographic-coalition pattern** that has shaped subsequent American politics: a Democratic coalition built around Black voters, Hispanic voters, Asian voters, college-educated white voters (especially women), and urban voters; a Republican coalition built around non-college white voters, evangelical Christians, rural voters, and exurban voters. The pattern has persisted in subsequent elections with the addition (in 2024) of substantial Hispanic male defection to the Republican coalition. ## Connections - [[Barack Obama]] — Reelected. - [[Mitt Romney]] — Republican nominee; later U.S. Senator from Utah; 2020 Trump impeachment vote dissenter. ---