Farewell Mitt Romney. What’s Next? Will He Become A Republican Party Titan Or Set Off Into the Sunset? Never To Be Heard From Again?

…. President Romney is a dashed-dream as we say farewell to Mitt Romney, Ann and a Vice President Paul Ryan.

Farewell to Mitt Romney! Ryan Romney wins election 2012 with 320 Electoral Collage votes to Obama Biden’s 218? Not at all. The Republican challenger to the Barack Obama machine was easily defeated, as the world knows, during the 2012 US election in which President Obama won a second term.

This marks the first time a minority President, African American or otherwise, has ever been re-elected to a second term. As everyone knows, Obama is the first black man to ever hold the office of the Presidency and the first modern racial minority to do so (it depends on how you define “minority”, for example John F. Kennedy was the first-ever Catholic President, a religious minority at the time, but not a racial one).

Here is Mitt Romney’s 2012 Concession Speech to President Obama, congratulating him on his win.

Barack Obama won the election with 332 Electoral College Votes compared to Mitt Romney’s dismal 206 Electoral College Votes. Barack Obama even won Florida (barely, by 1%) which was highly contested and whose results weren’t known until two weeks after the election. Netting Obama the full 29 votes. Obama won every battleground state outside of North Carolina, including Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Colorado, Nevada and New Hampshire. While his margin was only 1 or 2% in some states, it was over 4% and up to 6% in some.

Here is President Barack Obama’s full 2012 victory speech, thanking Mitt Romney for a challenging election race and looking towards the next four years of an Obama Administration.

The popular vote was much closer however. Obama won that as well with 62,611,250 raw votes compared to Romney’s 59,134,475 raw votes. The saddest part however is that Romney got 3 million fewer votes than John McCain got in 2008! Having said all this, it was still winnable by Romney, if he had gotten more Republicans out to vote. Even so, it was a huge win for Obama in the Electoral College, even if each state was not won by huge margins. Overall, Obama’s vote count in the popular vote was down 8% from 2008.

So what is next for Mitt Romney?

Here are exactly what states Obama won (in blue) and Romney won (in red).

Will Romney become a defacto leader of the Republican Party going ahead? Will he do what Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Herman Cain have done? Transition into Cable News, set-up PACs and groups, websites and the like, and build on their influence in the wake of their election loses? (Newt was already doing this before he decided to run).

I hope that Mitt Romney will do what those others have done. He is still a valuable Republican, he simply was not up to snuff as far as his Presidential prospects were concerned.