Analysis: Why Romney lost
November 7, 2012 -- Updated 2248 GMT (0648 HKT)
Romney: Election over, principles endure
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Some Republicans blame Sandy, stances on social issues for Romney loss
- Others say Obama's ground game was underestimated
- Loss of young, minority voters is sign party may be out of touch with fast-growing demographics
- Former GOP chairman questions whether Paul Ryan was best running mate pick
When it became clear
about midnight that President Barack Obama was safely on the way to
re-election, a handful of cranky and inebriated Republican donors
wandered about Romney's election night headquarters, angrily demanding
that the giant television screens inside the ballroom be switched from
CNN to Fox News, where Republican strategist Karl Rove was making
frantic, face-saving pronouncements about how Ohio was not yet lost.
Rove was wrong, of course.
But the signs of
desperation inside the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center on
Tuesday night were symptomatic of a Republican Party now standing at a
crossroads, with not much track in sight.
2 men, 2 speeches, 1 message
A six-year road to defeat for Romney
See the president's full victory speech
How did Romney lose a race that seemed so tantalizingly within reach just one week ago?
"We were this close," one of Romney's most senior advisers sighed after watching the Republican nominee concede. "This close."
Little support from young, minorities
Some answers are easy.
Romney lost
embarrassingly among young people, African-Americans and Hispanics, a
brutal reminder for Republicans that their party is ideologically out of
tune with fast-growing segments of the population.
Obama crushed Romney
among Hispanic voters by a whopping 44 points, a margin of victory that
likely propelled the president to victories in Nevada, Colorado and
possibly Florida.
The stunning defeat
alarmed Republicans who fear extinction unless the party can figure out
how to temper the kind of hardline immigration rhetoric that Romney
delivered during his Republican primary bid.
"Latinos were
disillusioned with Barack Obama, but they are absolutely terrified by
the idea of Mitt Romney," said GOP fundraiser Ana Navarro, a confidante
to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio.
Sandy upsets campaign 'momentum'
Beyond the ugly math
staring them in the face, Romney's top aides and the Republican
heavyweights who populated the somber ballroom Tuesday evening offered
an array of explanations for their loss.
With some of them
double-fisting beers and others sipping bourbon, members of Romney's
team blamed several factors that were, in some ways, beyond their
control.
Many campaign aides
pointed the finger at Sandy, the punishing superstorm and October
surprise that razed the East Coast and consumed news coverage for what
was supposed to be the final full week of campaigning.
It upset the dynamic of a
campaign that had been reset during the first debate in Denver, where
Obama delivered a wilting-flower act in full view of the American
populace that allowed Romney to seize control of the race and set the
terms for the final fall sprint.
The storm, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told CNN on Sunday, "broke Romney's momentum."
After being criticized
in the media for focusing on "small things" like Big Bird and
"Romnesia," Sandy offered Obama a chance to once again look
presidential.
There also are very real
hard feelings inside the Romney camp about the way New Jersey Gov.
Chris Christie, a Republican, seemed to lavish praise on Obama in the
wake of Sandy's destruction, allowing Obama to appear bipartisan just as
Romney was attacking him for being petty and partisan.
"He didn't have to bear hug the guy," complained one Romney insider.
"It won't be forgotten easily," grumbled another about Christie.
Social conservatives blame squishy positions
As Romney aides began
the soul-searching that usually follows a loss, Republicans outside the
campaign began pointing fingers at the team.
Some social
conservatives were quick to rip open barely healed wounds, claiming that
Romney's squishy positions on abortion and same-sex marriage -- closely
scrutinized during both of his Republican primary campaigns -- left
grass-roots Republicans uninspired.
"What was presented as
discipline by the Romney campaign by staying on one message, the
economy, was a strategic error that resulted in a winning margin of
pro-life votes being left on the table," said Marjorie Dannenfelser,
president of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List.
Some wondered aloud
about the selection of Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as Romney's running
mate, suggesting that a Republican from a more winnable battleground
state might have made a difference.
"Rob Portman would've
been worth 1% in Ohio," said former Ohio GOP Chairman Kevin DeWine.
"Marco Rubio would've been worth a point in Florida. Bob McDonnell
would've been worth a point in Virginia."
The Romney team and his
super PAC allies, some Republicans are already saying, ran a banal
series of television ads and allowed their candidate to be defined early
on by Obama as an outsourcing plutocrat who wanted to let Detroit go
bankrupt.
Their pushback seemed
feeble for most of the summer and early autumn. And crucially, Romney
never seemed to articulate a clear rationale for the presidency.
The campaign's decision
to air a misleading ad in Toledo media market about Chrysler moving Jeep
production to China during the closing days of the race is also
emerging as a prime reason for Romney's loss in the state he needed to
win most.
One senior Ohio
Republican called the Jeep ad a "desperate" move and said the Romney
campaign walked into a "hornet's nest" of negative press coverage.
Nick Everhart, a Columbus-based ad maker, blamed the Ohio loss, in part, on the Romney campaign's "poor media buying."
But an adviser to one
prominent Republican governor who campaigned for Romney said the
campaign's problems were more fundamental.
"Obama ran a very smart
but very small campaign, which he could afford to do because he was
running against a very small opponent," this Republican said. "The
fundamentals of the election were the same all along, and they were
this: When there's an incumbent no one wants to vote for, and a
challenger that no one wants to vote for, people will vote for the
incumbent. At no point did Romney give people any reason to vote for
him, and so they didn't."
Democrats' strong ground game
Romney may never have
been the GOP's dream candidate, but even if he were, Republicans would
still have been forced to confront another troubling structural problem
on Election Day.
Democrats showed
decisively that their ground game -- the combined effort to find,
persuade and turn out voters -- is devastatingly better than anything
their rivals have to offer.
In 2004, Republicans tapped the science of microtargeting to redefine campaigns. That is now ancient history.
"When it comes to the
use of voter data and analytics, the two sides appear to be as unmatched
as they have ever been on a specific electioneering tactic in the
modern campaign era," Sasha Issenberg, a journalist and an expert in the
science of campaigning, wrote just days before the election proved him
right. "No party ever has ever had such a durable structural advantage
over the other on polling, making television ads, or fundraising, for
example."
The Romney campaign and
the Republican National Committee entered Election Day boasting about
the millions of voter contacts -- door knocks and phone calls -- they
had made in all the key states.
Volunteers were making
the calls using an automated VOIP-system, allowing them to dial
registered voters at a rapid clip and punch in basic data about them on
each phone's keypad, feeding basic information into the campaign's voter
file.
But volunteer callers
were met with angry hang-ups and answering machines just as much as
actual voters on the other end of the line. It was a voter contact
system that favored quantity over quality.
At the same time, the campaign's door-to-door canvassing effort was heavily reliant on fired-up but untrained volunteers.
Obama organizers,
meanwhile, had been deeply embedded in small towns and big cities for
years, focusing their persuasion efforts on person-to-person contact.
The more nuanced data
they collected, often with handwritten notes attached, were synced
nightly with their prized voter database in Chicago.
After the dust had
cleared, the GOP field operation, which had derided the Obama operation
and gambled on organic Republican enthusiasm to push them over the top,
seemed built on a house of cards.
"Their deal was much
more real than I expected," one top Republican with close ties to the
Romney campaign said of the Obama field team.
Sources involved in the
GOP turnout effort admitted they were badly outmatched in the field by
an Obama get-out-the-vote operation that lived up to their immense hype
-- except, perhaps, in North Carolina, where Romney was able to pull out
a win and Republicans swept to power across the state.
Multiple Romney advisers
were left agog at the turnout ninjutsu performed by the Obama campaign,
both in early voting and on Election Day.
Not only did Obama field
marshals get their targeted supporters to the polls, they found new
voters and even outperformed their watershed 2008 showings in some
decisive counties, a remarkable feat in a race that was supposed to see
dampened Democratic turnout.
In Florida's
Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, the Obama campaign outpaced their
final 2008 tally by almost 6,000 votes. In Nevada's vote-rich Clark
County, Obama forces scrounged up almost 9,000 more votes than they did
four years ago.
Tuesday's outcome laid
bare this truth: The two campaigns placed very different bets on the
nature of the 2012 electorate, and the Obama campaign won decisively.
Romney officials had
modeled an electorate that looked something like a mix of 2004 and 2008,
only this time, Democratic turnout would be depressed, and the most
motivated voters would be whites, seniors, Republicans and independents.
Heading into Election
Day, the Romney campaign's final set of internal poll numbers showed
their candidate with a 6-point lead in New Hampshire, a 3-point lead in
Colorado, a 2-point lead in Iowa, a 3-point lead in Florida and near
ties in Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Ohio was their biggest
problem. According to the campaign's internal polls obtained by CNN,
Romney was trailing in the must-win state by a full 5 points on the
Sunday before the election, the last day of tracking.
Officials in Boston
dispatched Romney for a pair of 11th-hour campaign stops in Cleveland
and Pittsburgh, a show of Election Day vitality and confidence that was,
in reality, a last-ditch attempt to move the needle with just hours
until the polls closed.
The Obama campaign was of a different mindset.
Late last month, a few
days before Halloween, four members of Obama's senior campaign staff --
deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, pollster Joel Benenson,
battleground state director Mitch Stewart and press secretary Ben LaBolt
-- flew from Chicago to Washington to brief reporters on the state of
the race.
With the president's
campaign on the ropes in the wake of his awful debate performance in
Denver, the quartet had a straightforward, math-driven sales pitch.
The share of the
national white vote would decline as it has steadily in every election
since 1992. There would be modest upticks in Hispanic and
African-American voter registration, shifts that would overwhelmingly
favor the president. And Obama's get-out-the-vote operation was vastly
more sophisticated than the one being run by Romney and the Republican
National Committee.
On Monday, the night
before the election, the Obama campaign was optimistic their vision
would pan out. A relaxed group of about 60 campaign staffers including
campaign manager Jim Messina decamped to Houlihan's, just up the street
from their Chicago headquarters on Michigan Avenue, to drink beers and
take in Obama's final speech in Des Moines on C-SPAN.
The following morning,
bagels were delivered to headquarters for breakfast. Pizza was on the
menu for dinner. Some staffers in the in the campaign's press wing
turned on the Oxygen channel to watch a marathon of "America's Next Top
Model" -- a "mindless escape," in the words of one campaign operative.
When the results started flowing in, each chapter appeared to unfold as
planned.
The office burst into
loud cheers when Pennsylvania and Wisconsin turned blue early in the
evening, two very large pieces of mortar in a growing electoral
roadblock for Romney.
And when Ohio was called
for the president, the year-long avalanche of G-chats, e-mails and text
messages between reporters and campaign sources fell silent as
Obama-world closed ranks to celebrate their hard-won -- and meticulously
planned -- victory.
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