The white-run political press remained in denial about Romney's narrowly race-based candidacy right up to the end, mistaking the anomalies inside the white bubble for the general political climate. Thus in the final week before the election, the New York Times reported from Pennsylvania:
[T]here is a tangible sense—seen in Romney yard signs on the expansive lawns of homes in the well-heeled suburbs, and heard in the excited voices of Republican mothers who make phone calls to voters in their spare time—that the race is tilting toward Mr. Romney.
Obama won Pennsylvania by five points.
This was more than Bill O'Reilly could bear last night. Given exit polls and early returns pointing to Romney's defeat, O'Reilly made the racist assumptions of the losing side explicit:
[I]t's a changing country, the demographics are changing, it's not a traditional America anymore. And there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it and he ran on it.
And, whereby, 20 years ago President Obama would have been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney. The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that this economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff.
You're going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama and women will probably break President Obama's way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?
The white establishment, undone by hordes of various-colored people who demand stuff. Even as he admitted the white bloc was too small to win, O'Reilly still saw the winning side as an undifferentiated counter-bloc, rather than a coalition of Americans.
Obama won the Latino vote, 71 to 27. He also won the Asian vote, 73 to 26. Those voters all look the same to the losers. That's why they're the losers.
