How gays in Ohio could have won the election for Romney

Nov. 6, 2012: A steady stream of voters fill the voting booths at Ronald Reagan Lodge in West Chester, Ohio. (AP)

There has been a lot of talk about the Republican party needing to move to the modern era and include a broader demographic in the make up of the party.

The three groups that have been bandied about are women, Latinos and gays.

Obviously, a change in immigration policy would have brought in more of the Latinos this time around. A clearer movement towards women's current concerns would have sealed more votes for Governor Romney as well, as 55% of the female vote went to President Obama.

However, exit polling showed that 5% of those who voted in Ohio said they were gay, and 22% of them said they voted for Romney.

One of our Talk Radio News Service staffers, Geoff Holtzman, and I did some calculations, assuming that those exit poll numbers from Ohio represented the national trend.

We found the following in Ohio:

- 5,364,324 people voted.

- President Obama got 2,691,861 votes, while Mitt Romney got 2,584,620 votes. That means Romney lost the state by 107,241 votes.

- 5% of OH voters said they are gay. That's 268,214 voters. 22% of them said they voted for Romney. That's 59,007 voters.

Now, Romney received roughly 48% of the total vote in America on Tuesday. We wondered, what if Romney earned 48% of the gay vote in Ohio? Would that have helped him win the state?

Our calculations found that 48% of gay voters in Ohio equals 128,742 voters. Or 69,736 more gay voters than Romney actually received.

By our math, if Romney earned 69,736 more votes, he would have totaled 2,654,356 votes, and Obama would've totaled 2,622,125. Therefore, Romney would have won Ohio by 32,231 votes.

We ran these figures by GOProud's Jimmy LaSalvia, who not only agreed with our findings, but speculated that appealing to the gay community would have also endeared Republicans to other key groups that proved elusive to them on Tuesday. "The Republicans need to deal with the political reality that young voters, women and Hispanics overwhelmingly support same-sex marriage," he told us.

LaSalvia's right, the demographics have changed, and the Romney campaign failed to recognize that.