Nate Cohn writes in the New York Times about how relying on exit polls to measure turnout has created lots of myths about our recent political history, such as the GOP necessity of Hispandering:

There Are More White Voters Than People Think. That’s Good News for Trump.

Nate Cohn @Nate_Cohn JUNE 9, 2016

… Mr. Obama’s dependence among white voters might seem surprising in light of the 2012 postelection consensus. But it won’t be surprising if you think just a little further back — to the pre-election story line. Mr. Obama’s advantage heading into the election was thought to be a “Midwestern Firewall” — a big edge in Midwestern battlegrounds where white working-class voters supported the auto bailout and were skeptical of Mr. Romney, who was criticized for his time at Bain Capital.

The pre-election story line was tossed aside when the national exit polls showed an electorate that was even more diverse than it was in 2008, while showing Mr. Obama faring worse among white voters than any Democrat since Walter Mondale in 1984.

But I explained exactly that right after the 2012 election. On November 12, 2012, I wrote in VDARE:

Finally, there’s another finding from the Reuters data that’s not widely comprehended yet.

Romney could have won the Electoral College in what can be called the Big Ten states (after the college football conference of the Great Lakes and Upper Midwest: remember, Illinois and Michigan each have two teams in the Big Ten). He did win Indiana, and he lost Obama’s home state of Illinois badly. The other six states in this region, however, all slipped through his fingers: Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

In each of these Slippery Six states, Romney won at least 45 percent of the vote. But he still wound up a cumulative 0 for 80 in Electoral Votes. If Romney, rather than Obama, had won all six, he’d be President.

The Slippery Six are states with old-fashioned white and black voting demographics, still with a smattering of old time unionized factory workers. Hispanics, much less Asians, are, for the moment, still a minor matter politically.

According to Reuters, Romney lost the Slippery Six states because (exactly as VDARE.com warned repeatedly while digging white share data out of reluctant tracking polls, see here and here and here), he did badly there among white voters—winning only 52 percent, six points worse than nationally.

Most notably, Romney did terribly among the white working class in these six states. Thus he did only two points worse among whites with college degrees in the Slippery Six than he did nationally. But among the white “some college” component, he came in six points worse than nationally. And among the white “no college” voters, he performed 11 points worse than across the country—finishing tied with Obama.

In fact (although sample sizes are getting small), Romney even appears to have suffered the ignominy of a reverse gender gap among no-college whites in the Slippery Six—winning 51.4 percent of the women, but only 48 percent of the white working class men.

So the hidden story of the 2012 election just might come down to Romney not appealing to blue collar white guys in this swing region. Or you could attribute it to the immensely rich Obama campaign’s relentless negative advertising all summer depicting Romney as an outsourcing zillionaire.

A big advantage I had in 2012 was I was just about the only pundit who used the giant Reuters-Ipsos online panel.

[Comment at Unz.com]