Today they’re wondering what went wrong. This election seemed like a piece of cake going in, but the reality now is that there are four more years of President Obama, a gain of 6+ seats for the Dems in the House, and a gain of 2 seats for the Dems in the Senate during the one election in the six year cycle when their Senate seats are the most vulnerable. Ouch.

Today they're frustrated and doing their fair share of finger pointing. They think Obama won because his supporters are stupid, or that we want free stuff from the government. In truth, they lost because they have it all wrong:

They're the ones who will suggest Obama is a Muslim in the same breath that they say he supports abortion and gay-marriage.

They're the ones who believed the NRA's paranoid, manipulative 2008 hype that Obama was going to take away their guns (he didn't), and they believed it again in 2012. Not only do they not accept the reality of it, they don't seem to understand that any gun control laws are LEGISLATION and would have to originate in Congress and would have to survive all three branches of government. Even a middle-schooler knows that much about government.

They're the ones that believe Obama spent his way to a $5T increase in the national debt, even though spending has scarcely increased since 2009 whereas tax revenues have decreased steadily since 2002. Again not accepting the reality of it, and again not understanding that Congress is the branch of government with the sole power to tax and spend. Still, this is nothing more than middle school civics. They want to blame Obama for each year’s budget deficit, but couldn’t tell you how much of it is the result of mandatory spending passed into law before Obama was president. They are quick to lambast Obama for the debt which they somehow believe is entirely his fault, but had/have zero problem with the borrow-and-spend that was happening under Bush.

They're the ones who think the stimulus was a waste of money, even though the trajectory of all key economic indicators changed not long after its passage, and even though a large majority of economists not only say it worked, but that it should have been bigger.

They insisted that almost no one is better off, even though a plurality (bordering on a majority) of people say they are. They say we’re headed in the wrong direction, even though the stock markets, manufacturing, orders for durable goods, housing sales and average housing prices, net and gross job creation, and nearly every other key economic indicator changed direction under Obama while consistently spiraling downward under Bush.

They're the ones who pushed abstinence-based sex education, and continued pushing it even as their rates of teen pregnancy increased.

They're the ones that say liberals are against freedom of religion because we don't allow them to legislate their beliefs onto everyone. They think the Constitution gives them the freedom of religious expression, or that the result of combining freedom of religion with freedom of expression is additive.

They're the ones that think democrats want an electorate that's dependent on government, even though the majority of food stamp increases in the last four years have been in counties that are predominantly "red".

They believe welfare recipients are looking for a handout and a way to avoid working, even though non-working poor make up less than 10% of welfare recipients and less than 5% of food stamp recipients. The vast majority of people who receive aid (i.e. the 47%) are made up of the elderly and other retirees, people who are disabled, active military, single-parents and others who are employed but can't make ends on what they earn. They don't seem to know that a majority of people who are on welfare are off it within 18 months or less, and 90% are off of it within 2.5 years. They don’t seem to understand the 47% is made up of BOTH parties.

They're the ones who parroted the conservative talking points that Obama removed the work requirement for welfare recipients, even though the HHS memorandum that proved that it wasn’t unconditional was easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection and 8th grade reading comprehension. Even though a group of bipartisan governors (including Mitt Romney) asked the federal government for the same flexibility Obama gave them.

They're the ones who begrudge the poor who they think are gaming the welfare system while not violating the letter of the law, but completely forgiving of corporations and the ultra-wealthy who actually are gaming the tax system while not violating the letter of the law.

They're the ones who believed that Iraq had WMDs and operational ties to Al Qaeda.

They think the media has a liberal bias, when it’s actually dictated by viewership, ratings/demographics, target audiences, and advertising dollars.

They're the ones who think Obama was born in Kenya despite a certified birth certificate and a birth announcement as evidence to the contrary, while having ZERO evidence of their own.

They believe Obama’s economic policies have failed, even though Congressional Republicans never passed said policies for Obama to enact in the first place.

They believe Obama is to blame when gas prices to up, and that he gets no credit when they go down, even though market experts say the price fluctuation is the result of changes in supply and demand of a speculative commodity.

They believed the health care mandate was unconstitutional. They believe that healthcare being solely between a patient and their doctor, provided by private healthcare providers, and paid by private insurance companies amounts to socialism. But they have no problem driving on public roads from their homes attached to a national infrastructure on their way to the farmer’s market, and then to the post office where they mail their letters of support to our publically funded military.

They're the people who make assertions about the poor, the government, democrats, and the president, but can never back it up with facts or anything beyond vague anecdote. It seems like if they'd done the research and arrived at conclusions on their own, they be able to go into detail and cite facts. Nope. All they're doing is repeating what they heard someone else say.

They believe tax cuts for the wealthy create jobs, despite no record in our history of that actually happening, with the most recent account being the Bush tax cuts. In the same sentence where they talk about how bad taxes are, they’ll tell you how bad deficits are. That contradiction ought to be obvious to anyone with a little common sense and an understanding of math at a fourth grade level.

There is very little they've gotten right, including their presidential candidate. He was their last choice. They treated him with kid gloves during the primaries so as not to damage their presumptive nominee, and in the process they lost an opportunity for vetting their candidate. They were enthusiastic about the conservatives in the primaries, but chose a chronically vacillating moderate based on perceived electability rather than merit and values. They weren't excited to vote for Romney, just excited to vote against the incumbent. Ask John Kerry (and now Mitt Romney) how well that works.

They lost because they live in a fantasy world where everything negative is Obama's fault, and nothing positive is to his credit. Forgetting for a second partisan bias and examples of Obama's actual shortcomings, it should have been obvious to them that NOTHING in this world is that absolute, and especially not among the imperfections of our leaders from both major parties.

They lost because they won't challenge what their politicians say, and they prove it every time they parrot one of the many conservative talking points that have been debunked. They picked a candidate who wouldn't let his campaign be dictated by fact checkers, because that is representative of their approachl.

They lost, because they nominated for the highest governing leadership position in the country a person who couldn't even stand up to his OWN party.

They lost because they accepted and perpetuated anything they wanted to believe, and rejected anything that invalidated what they were inclined to believe. When ideology and prejudice were incompatible with reality, they rejected reality. That worked fine in the primaries and a world where they were running a “straw man” candidate against their fabricated perception of Obama, and it worked fine as long as they could campaign in that same bubble. The election however, was held in reality, which is a place where the Democrats have the home field advantage.

When most polls and analysts like Nate Silver, Intrade, et al, showed Obama ahead, the Romney supporters said they were skewed and clung to the one or two polls that showed Romney competitive or ahead. When Obama slid in the polls after the first debate, they immediately went with any polls that showed Romney rallying or ahead, despite the previous claims of skew. When Romney's internals showed him ahead in Ohio towards the end of the campaign, his supporters swallowed that whole, and then on election day Romney back peddles and states that those numbers were invalid. Gullible much? In looking at the actual outcome of the election, nothing does a better job of underscoring the chronic conservative tendency to believe whatever suits them, regardless of facts and reality. This is a grave display of self-dishonesty from a group of people, many of whom label themselves as Christian or at least honest.

They don't trust the government and don't seem to approve of a lot of what the government does, but they don't realize that's just a symptom of the same problem that lost the election for them: their ignorance. When a representative democracy, a government of and by the people, is dysfunctional, the problem is the people. They don't challenge what their partisans are telling them. The can't see beyond their own party lines. They choose not to see or believe anything that contradicts what they want to believe. They've essentially become surrogates and imitators of the same partisan posturing that we used to only hear from politicians. If they want to know what's wrong with government and why their party lost in this election cycle, the answer is no farther away from them than a mirror. But that would mean they'd have to take some responsibility. I don't see that happening.

Will conservatives learn from this? I doubt it. In fact, I’m counting on it. But who really knows? What I can say is that this was a good election cycle to be on the sides of the Democrats, and the probable GOP implosion (circular firing squad?) is going to be entertaining to watch.

