Short: What went wrong with Walker

Buried in a predictable but correct article by Sean Trende is perhaps the best guess at what happened to Walker's bid for the presidency:

Walker lost because he had no strategy. There was no David Axelrod for the Walker campaign; Scott Walker hired Scott Walker to be his David Axelrod.

...A presidential candidate has a more-than-full-time job: being a candidate. He or she does not have time to follow ever-changing electoral dynamics. So when a candidate without a good strategist is faced with Supreme Court decisions on gay marriage, questions about the legality of abortion to save the life of the mother, the rise of birthright citizenship as an issue or, say, the ascendency of Donald Trump, that candidate will flail.

Sounds plausible to me. Of course I read many comments from Wisconsiners about how horrid Walker was and predicting his failure. However, you can always predict the failure of a presidential candidate, and 95% of the time you'll be right. Only one person is going to make it to the White House, and all the others will reward your dour predictions. Predicting the winner is hard, predicting a loser is like hitting the broad side of a barn. I guess Walker hit that barn pretty hard.

Image: @Anomaly100

...Or did he tank because he frequently looks like a doofus?

Evidence of the missing conservative voters

A claim I frequently read is that Romney lost the 2012 election because he was too moderate and turned off conservative voters, who stayed home in droves. I've always doubted this claim, and the commenters have never supplied any evidence.

Finally I found links to some pieces that provide some evidence for this assertion. I have to admit that the main article discussing this is two years old. (Well, better late than never.) The author, Sean Trende, is a data-obsessed analyst, as demonstrated by him declining to 'unskew' his reading of poll data in 2012.

Trende reports that demographic projections show that 6.5 million white voters sat out the 2012 election unexpectedly. The map below shows lower turnout in blue and higher turnout in red:

Image: realclearpolitics.com

Trende found that areas with a strong Perot vote in 1992 showed declines from expected turnout. He describes a particular kind of voter who seemed to stay away:

[They were] secular, blue-collar, often rural voters who were turned off by Bill Clinton’s perceived liberalism and George H.W. Bush’s elitism. They were largely concentrated in the North and Mountain West...

However, this 'Perot' effect was hardly the biggest factor. The Perot vote was a smaller factor than Hurricane Sandy in keeping people from the polls.

Despite an interesting analysis, Trende has perhaps identified only a small part of the reason for the missing white voters. Still, no one has shown why so many whites stayed home. So those claims about the candidate 'not being conservative enough' are quite empty, no matter how loudly made.

Image: foxnews.com

Extras. Poorly done appeals to blue-collar workers here. Site with easy to read statistics. The coal miners shown above and their incentive to attend the Romney rally or else.

Update 2/25/16. More evidence that True Conservatives didn't stay home in droves. Of course, you have to care about data and evidence to be swayed by this information. No True Conservative or True Believer would allow themselves to doubt the legend of the golden horde of lost conservatives.