In the days after the 2012 election, the headline results were plain enough: President Barack Obama had won a second term, and Alabama had once again voted overwhelmingly Republican. Yet beneath those obvious outcomes, Mobile Bay area analysts found a more complicated ledger of winners and losers, one that turned on ticket-splitting, demographic shifts and the quiet resurgence of old power centers.
A national defeat, local consolation
Bradley Byrne, a Mobile attorney and Republican, offered one of the fullest post-mortems. Nationally, he argued, the taxpayer and the job-seeker had lost the most, with a divided Washington poised for continued gridlock. At the state level, Democrats had absorbed the expected blows but found life in local races in Jefferson, Montgomery, Madison and Tuscaloosa counties. He pointed, too, to the roughly 200,000 Romney voters who split their tickets to support Democratic chief justice candidate Robert Vance, a sign of residual strength the party could build on.
Byrne reserved particular attention for the Alabama Education Association, which he said had enjoyed a strong year by helping defeat Amendment 4 and blocking several of the governor’s priorities. The Forever Wild conservation amendment, he observed, drew more votes in Alabama than Mitt Romney himself, evidence of broad bipartisan support for land conservation.
The lessons of ticket-splitting
Adam Bourne of the Chickasaw City Council flagged a pair of local surprises that had gone largely unreported. Two Democrats, Lucy Baxley and Vance, had actually carried Mobile County even as they lost statewide, with Vance running more than 10,000 votes ahead there. The lesson, Bourne said, was that general elections in Alabama still mattered and that both parties needed to nominate their most effective candidates rather than take any race for granted.
Businessman Sage Lyons attributed Romney’s national defeat to the campaign’s failure to connect with Latino and female voters, compounded by the late disruption of Hurricane Sandy and by damaging remarks from Senate candidates in other states. A recurring theme among several analysts was that Alabama’s tough immigration law had done real harm to the Republican brand among Hispanic voters, an unintended consequence with national reach.
Warnings for a triumphant party
Even amid Republican dominance, some voices urged caution. Consultants warned that shifting demographics favored Democrats over the long term unless the GOP broadened its appeal on immigration, health care and other issues. The Obama campaign’s mastery of micro-targeting and turnout, several agreed, had been the decisive edge, and Republicans would need to modernize their own ground game and use of social media, a point echoed by Mobile City Councilwoman Bess Rich.
For Baldwin County Republicans, the mood was celebratory. Analysts crowned the county the reddest in a very red state, with its countywide races going uncontested by Democrats, and praised Probate Judge Tim Russell for managing record turnout of roughly 75 percent smoothly on Election Day.
A plea for governance
Retired congressman Jack Edwards, a Republican, used the moment to call for a return to regular cooperation between the White House and congressional leaders, recalling the weekly meetings of his own years in office. Rosemary Elebash of the National Federation of Independent Business warned that small-business owners still faced uncertainty over taxes, regulation and the looming fiscal cliff, while celebrating the passage of Amendment 7, which guaranteed secret ballots in union elections.
If the analysts agreed on anything, it was that the election had settled less than it appeared. Obama would govern a divided capital; Alabama Democrats faced a long road back even as they clung to pockets of local strength; and a triumphant state Republican Party confronted quiet warnings about the demographics of the future. The work of governing, everyone seemed to concede, was only beginning.