The 2012 Presidential election was hotly contested between the Democratic and American Independent parties. Ultimately, two energized bases and well-oiled political machines went to head-to-head, and it became a numbers game of who could turn out the most voters in the critical states. Fortunately for Perry, his popularity in his home state, as well as the political machine supporting him and millions of Hispanic voters alienated by the Goode campaign, carried Texas (alone among its southern brethren) and with it, the election.
The 2012 election was by no means a walk for Perry and the Democratic Party. Entering the general election season, Perry was plagued by both persistent back pain and a lukewarm reception from the urban liberals and African-American voters that had supported Kennedy in the primaries. During the primaries, Governor Perry had taken medication for his condition, and after blaming this medication for several gaffes during the debates with Kennedy he had used the tail-end of the primary season - while the Republicans and American Independents were still hammering out their tickets - to resume his physical therapy, seek alternative medications, and simply rest while the after-effects from his 2011 surgery wore off. When Governor Perry returned to the campaign trail after the DNC, he came back with his back pain under control and had traded in his contact lenses for glasses - while the look earned criticism and mockery on social media, focus-groups attested that overall the switch detracted from the "dumb cowboy" caricature that had been created during the primaries. Having focused his primary campaign on rural whites and Hispanics, Perry now took to the cities to make his case to other minority communities, vowing to fight for and defend their interests as American citizens equal under God. Meanwhile, Senator Kennedy was instrumental to bringing his supporters on board, reassuring liberals on the coasts that Governor Perry was in fact not a secret American Independent that would ban all abortion and abolish all firearm regulations. While Kennedy campaigned across the nation's cities and college campuses, Sanchez's barnstorming of the southwest was instrumental in boosting Hispanic turnout, and has been attributed to helping keep Texas and California in the Democratic camp (and locking Johnson out of his home state).
Of course, Senator Goode and the American Independents put up a good fight of their own. Running against the backdrop of the Santorum administration, Goode promised to continue upon its positive aspects - campaigning on a family-friendly platform of protecting the "real America" from the horrors of child-murder, deviant alternative lifestyles, and forced multilingualism in American schools. Goode, blending the "classic" AIP anti-government philosophy with Santorum's brand of right-wing Christian populism, also campaigned on a retreat from neoconservative-inspired military interventions and costly government aid programs to anti-American foreigners. However, for much of the country, the chief issue of the 2012 election was immigration and America's relationship with its neighbors to the south. While Perry and Sanchez campaigned on establishing a pathway to citizenship for law-abiding and taxpaying undocumented immigrants, Goode and LePage campaigned on continuing Santorum's round-ups and deportations while simultaneously adopting a position skeptical of the Common Market, likening it to a "backdoor" for which Latin Americans could continue to take Americans jobs and money. In doing so, Goode was able to rally the AIP base and increase turnout among the Rust Belt, but it simply was not enough.
However, a lasting impact of the Goode campaign was to legitimize the somewhat maligned and lost paleoconservative wing. Since 2004, many paleoconservatives had felt ignored by the Santorum administration, and with Buchanan ostensibly retired from electoral politics and Barr's 2008 campaign imploding, they had drifted in the wilderness for nearly a decade. They found in Goode a new standard-bearer, though at the cost of alienating key players in the State and Defense departments.
The real loser of the 2012 election was the Republican/Libertarian Party ticket. The Republican Party had found itself increasingly under siege in recent years. Though many in the party had been confident that the nomination of a southern conservative for the Democratic ticket would send thousands of disgruntled liberal voters to the party, this was complicated by several factors. First of which was Kennedy and other prominent liberal Democrat quickly falling in line behind Perry, shoring up his support by groups which ordinarily would not vote for a southern conservative (then again, Roemer was a southern conservative and never had any issues). Second was the growing gap between the Republican Party and the youth vote, which it had done well with since the 1980s. However, the Republican Party's adherence to classical liberal economics came into direct conflict with the rising cost of college tuition and increasingly high numbers of young Americans unable to find employment to escape their debts. Gary Johnson's stances on student loan debt and welfare programs came off to many student activists as callous, and as a result thousands of would-be GOP/Libertarian voters stayed home, or voted for Perry (or Kucinich or Stewart). This was compounded by nearly two decades of emphasis on vocational schools and alternatives to a college education - as a result of programs put into place by pretty much every American President between Gore and Santorum, the percent of the American electorate that traditional students comprised had actually decreased since the 1990s. Lastly was simple demographics; many once-reliable Republican voters had either moved to the Democrats, AIP, or simply died.
Speaking of student activists, the Greens had hoped nominating a former Democratic Congressman would help increase their numbers. Ultimately, however, Kucinich was unable to rally many Democrats to the Green Party banner, and in the end the Greens only carried their usual group of angry far-leftists as well as a few thousand disgruntled ex-Republicans. This was blamed, in large part, on the surprisingly effective campaign by liberal Democratic legislators to rally behind Perry to boot the AIP out of the White House. Additionally, they weren't the only protest ticket around.
The Stewart/Johnson ticket was an interesting one. Americans Elect was founded by a group who believed that establishment politics and the AIP-Democratic duopoly were the key roadblocks to effective legislation, and that unchaining the voices of the common people would usher in a political revolution built on bipartisanship and common understanding. However, they made a fatal flaw: they did not understand how the average web-surfer interacted with politics. As a result of a "viral" campaign among social media sites like Facebook and Reddit, Americans Elect was forced to run a comedian with a former wrestler and action star. However, the ticket did not exactly get far. First and foremost was the reluctance of Stewart and Johnson to campaign; they knew perfectly well that they had been nominated as a joke by pranksters on the internet, and beyond a running gag on Stewart's show the two did not seriously campaign. Second was the fact that Americans Elect really did not have anything of a campaign infrastructure; as an experiment in "digital democracy" they had no door-knockers, no phone-bankers, no fliers. Apparently, you can't run a campaign on memes alone. The whole incident has left the backers of Americans Elect a little disillusioned, and it seems unlikely that they will be fielding a ticket in 2016.
Interestingly enough, 2012 was the first election in which both parties had a prominent Former/Soon-to-be-former President acting as campaign surrogates. While most of the spotlight was on the Perry-Goode race, many networks publicized the apparent feud between former President Roemer and incumbent two-term President Santorum, both of whom had taken to the trail to support their respective parties' campaigns.
In the end, the Democratic Party was able to effectively increase turnout among traditional Democratic voting blocs and ex-Republicans to narrowly carry the White House, despite fears (somewhat realized) of low turn-out by those turned off by Perry's brand southern, socially conservative populism. And so Rick Perry became the 44th President of the United States, and Loretta Sanchez became the nation's second female (and first ever Hispanic) Vice President.
