In his first post-election interview, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan blamed the loss by the Republican presidential ticket last week on high turnout among ‘urban’ voters.
‘We were surprised at the outcome,’ he told WISC-TV, his home state’s CBS affiliate. ‘We knew this was gonna be a close race. We thought we had a very good chance of winning it.’
‘Losing never feels good,’ he added.
Ryan said he was expecting to get more support from voters in big cities, which generally tend to vote Democratic.
‘I think the surprise was some of the turnout, some of the turnout especially in urban areas, which gave President Obama the big margin to win this race,’ he said. ‘When we watched Virginia and Ohio coming in, and those ones coming in as tight as they were, and looking like we were going to lose them, that’s when it became clear we weren’t going to win.’
Ryan’s liberal critics accused him of suggesting that inner-city minorities were responsible for Obama’s win.
‘FYI, Paul Ryan, the rest of the country has moved on from using “urban” as a euphemism for “black,”‘ wrote Ronan Farrow, an adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on Twitter.
Meanwhile, it was revealed that Mitt Romney did not receive a single vote across 59 voting districts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a state where the Romney campaign had made an expensive last-ditch effort to win just before the election.
The voting divisions, which counted 19,605 votes for Obama and zero votes for Romney, are ‘clustered in almost exclusively black sections of West and North Philadelphia,’ according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
