Since the election there has been non-stop bloviation as to why Mitt Romney lost.  The real question is “Why did Obama win?”.  There are many levels to the answer.  There is the micro-level.  Obama won because he had a better “ground game.”  The Obama campaign was much more effective in getting his supporters to the poll, especially considering that there seemed to be a lot less enthusiasm than there was in 2008.  The meso-level explanation is that Obama won because he captured those groups which were demographically ascendant — minorities, women, young people.  But there is a macro-level as well — the level reflected in all the political science and economic models which were able to predict an Obama victory in the late summer, models dependent on only two or three variables.  One of these variables, the rate of GDP growth in the third quarter of 2012 was largely out of the President’s control.  Perhaps the most important variable over which he had some control was his approval rating.  Despite presiding over the worst post-World War II recession of all time, despite engendering an almost maniacal enmity in those who opposed him, despite stagnating real incomes for those who had jobs, and declining prospects for most American families, despite being an African American (or maybe because he was an African-American), the president’s job approval rating topped 50% by the time Americans started paying attention to the election.

There’s a long list of reasons why Mitt Romney lost:  people didn’t like him, conservatives mistrusted him, he was forced by a difficult nomination process to shift to the right and then to the left, the nomination process itself cost him months of energy and effort, Super Storm Sandy, the Democrat’s ground game, the 47% video, his unfortunate suggestion that illegal aliens self-deport themselves, etc.  But the real reason the President won despite the fact that under his watch the economy was a shambles, was that people had come to believe that he was not responsible for the economy’s woes, and that he was a good guy, a guy who “gets” them, and it was better to let him try to finish the job then to turn the Presidency over to someone whom they didn’t trust and who didn’t trust them.  Mitt Romney didn’t lose the election; Barack Obama won it.