Posted on 11/09/2012 4:02:56 PM PST by Kaslin
Mitt Romney's top campaign aides conducted a conference call with conservative journalists this afternoon, during which they assessed the damage from Tuesday's electoral loss. The participants included campaign manager Matt Rhoades, political director Rich Beeson, polling director Neil Newhouse and digital director Zac Moffatt. A few notes from the call:
Matt Rhoades, on the overall race: "No campaign is perfect, and we certainly made our share of mistakes." On Paul Ryan: "He has come away from this race with a very bright future before him."
Rich Beeson, on the campaign's strategy: "We won independents and held the base. We thought that would be a winning combination." Given the heavily Democratic electorate, it was not. On Boston's computerized 'ORCA' ground game tracking system: "This was the first time we'd ever done anything like [ORCA] on that grand a scale. We got data from 91% of precincts across the country," he said, noting that the program will help Republicans track and predict voting behavior in the future. As for reports that the system crashed on election day, Beeson conceded that there were significant technical issues: "There were glitches in the system, I don't want to gloss over that. We were able to beta test it, but not at the volume of data we needed." He said the program thought it had been hacked, which triggered a laborious process of rebooting the whole system with new passwords.
Neil Newhouse, on the outcome: "It didn't end up like we'd hoped for and expected (more on the "expected" part later). [The Obama campaign] ran a very small campaign in a very big way." Newhouse said the opposition effectively targeted specific demos in their coalition, using contraceptives, DREAM Act waivers, and student loan policies to entice key elements of their base to show up and vote. They "pretty damn well succeeded" at turning out their voters, he concluded. As an example, Newhouse pointed out that in Ohio, 160,000 more African Americans voted in 2012 than in 2008. Obama's margin of victory in the state was roughly 100,000. On the other hand, "we had fewer white voters turn out [nationwide] in this election than in 2008. The question we have to ask ourselves is 'how did that happen?'"
Newhouse, on Romney's strengths: In exit polling, voters were asked about four metrics of leadership. Romney beat Obama on the questions of (a) which candidate has a positive vision for the country, (b) which candidate shares "my values," and (c) which candidate is a "strong leader." Despite batting .750, Romney got crushed by approximately 60 points on the question of which candidate "cares about people like me." This suggests that the Obama campaign's early "kill Romney" approach -- painting the former governor and CEO as an out-of-touch, uber-wealthy, outsourcing robber barron -- worked. It also suggests that personal connection and relatability are now more important factors in national elections than experience or accomplishment. Newhouse added that the right track/wrong track statistics tightened by 48 net points from November of 2011 through election day, which helped boost the president's approval rating to non-fatal levels.
Newhouse, on the effects of Hurricane Sandy: "It was not determinative. It was a factor, it was not the factor. But it hit the pause button on our campaign and our messaging for about four or five days, and it gave Obama the opportunity to look presidential." Newhouse said exit polling indicated that about three percent of the electorate said Sandy was the most important factor (!) in their presidential choice, and that many of them made up minds in the last few days of the campaign.
Question and answer period:
The Washington Examiner's Michael Barone asked whether the birth control attacks were effective. The campaign brain trust said that HHS' contraception move was narrowly targeted at a segment of the population -- young unmarried women, whom Obama carried by 38 points on Tuesday. Romney's advisers said Team Obama knew exactly what they were doing by running the unseemly "first time" ad; they recognized they'd face blowback from some elements of the population, but thought it was worth it on balance, in order to appeal to young women.
PJTV's Roger Simon asked about Romney's bruising loss among Hispanic voters. The entire Romney team acknowledged that this was a big problem, and that Republicans need to think hard about how to reverse this trend. Part of the issue, Beeson said, was that Obama's campaign spent heavily on brutally negative ads against Romney for many months over the late spring and summer, before Romney had the resources to fight back. "By that time, [Hispanic voters] were already predisposed against us," he said. Romney's advisers also mentioned that the attack ads Obama ran on Spanish language radio and television were far "meaner, tougher and over-the-top" than "any attacks they leveled against us in English." This battle played out intensely, but off the mainstream media's radar.
I asked about the October "expand the map" strategy, which demonstrably failed. Was the campaign engaging in a deliberate head-fake by pretending that Pennsylvania, Minnesota and other states were in play -- or did they actually believe they had their core path locked up (through Virginia, Florida, Colorado, etc), and thus had the luxury of expansion? I also wondered aloud which scenario would be worse (misdirection vs. bad intel). The Romney brain trust seemed to side-step the heart of my inquiry, instead focusing on the Pennsylvania aspect. Newhouse: "The decision was not made lightly to expand the map. In order for us to go into PA, we had to have every other friggen' thing in the campaign fully funded. We went to everyone to make sure they were fully funded before we went into Pennsylvania. Every other need was met before we did that. The guys on the ground in PA, including our polling guys, were very encouraging. Our numbers were positive there. As it turns out, it was relatively close, but it wasn't as close as other target states." Beeson: "The Obama campaign saw the same numbers we did. They clearly saw it closing. We wanted to wait as long as we could to prevent them from getting that Philadelphia machine fired up in time."
These analyses make sense, but only within the context of the campaign truly believing that they were safe in other crucial must-have states -- a cataclysmically wrong assumption. When I stopped by Romney headquarters in Boston back in September, Newhouse said his team was anticipating a D+3 electorate in November. This seemed entirely reasonable to me, based on evidence from 2004, 2008 and 2010, but it turned out to be incorrect. The actual electorate this year was D+6. Post-election news reports reveal that Mitt Romney was "shell-shocked" by his loss, an outcome that can only be explained by shockingly flawed internal polling. Was that polling predicated on a D+3 model? If so, that would explain the huge disconnect between Boston's expectations and the final results. I'll reiterate that although the D+3 model seemed sensible on its face, it was the campaign pollsters' job to figure out if their assumptions comported with reality. In retrospect, their failure to do so looms very, very large.
Finally, Joel Pollak from Breitbart asked if the campaign's gurus felt like they'd let down the American people, particularly Romney's supporters. The takeaway line from a relatively broad answer to this (admittedly tough) question came from Neil Newhouse: "There's a sense that we let Mitt Romney down." If the candidate truly expected to be delivering a victory speech on Tuesday night, even as he was in the process of losing the popular vote by two percentage points and the electoral college by a wider margin, Newhouse's assertion isn't too far off.
UPDATE - Here is Jen Rubin's WaPo write-up of the same call.
It was over for Romney when Obama used the term "Romneysia" for the first time, that stopped Mitt's momentum dead. And the sad fact is, it was true......we knew it during the primaries, but we conveniently forgot about it after he was the nominee.
Yes he did smart ass.
Mitt’s a good & decent man, but he does not belong in politics. He has no understanding of the monsterous evil that American leftism has become. He could not fight this evil & allowed this evil to paint him as the “bad guy”. In the end....he would have made a great president for the 1950s when this was still America. And that’s no insult to Mitt. We live in evil times.
This could all have been avoided. Romney was way too liberal and did come across as condescending and wooden, although I have no doubt that he is a decent person himself and he certainly would have been infinitely preferable to Obama - but so would my cat, and I don’t even have one!
I really blame Rush Limbaugh for this. When the Gingrich campaign responded to Romney’s personal attacks on him with a spot suggesting that Bain was not exactly just going around like Lady Bountiful handing out loans to small businesses, but was in fact buying and stripping large companies, and was not showing the good side of capitalism (because Romney, frankly, was not honest about his early days), Rush ran to his rescue and shot Gingrich down as being “anti-capitalist.”
That was ridiculous, but unfortunately, I think it worked with a lot of conservatives who worship Rush, and it really killed Gingrich’s momentum more than anything else. Rush himself can be very condescending (I hate it when he refers to some of his listeners as “hicks”) and while it’s entertaining to hear which fantastic golf course he has played at with what bunch of mega-rich guys or which game he has watched from the owner’s box or how he has paid for a $100,000 medical treatment by writing a check, most of us can’t do that. In other words, I think his own delight at being now in the world of the rich and famous blinded him to the significant drawbacks that Romney, born rich and liberal (his mother was pro-abortion and his father apparently liked Alinsky), would have in relating to the rest of us as the GOP candidate.
I didn’t care, personally, since I never liked Romney from the start and my opinion improved only when he had a brief flash of patriotism and combativeness, but I was prepared to vote for him in any case. I don’t even expect to like any of the people they put up for us as candidates anymore. But there were other people who couldn’t get past his persona; that is, they weren’t going to vote for Obama, but they weren’t going to vote for Romney, either. And they didn’t.
Gingrich commented that Romney was going to be demonized for his less than innocent business activities by the press, and this was actually what happened. And Romney had absolutely no personal sensitivity, so he was never able to reset the image and kept on saying stupid things (the “47%” comment) that gave his enemies fodder, exactly as Gingrich had said they would. But in the meantime, Rush destroyed Gingrich.
Bishop Mitt Romney, pro-abortion, pathological liar, anti-freedom, anti-Christian and a man who actually and literally believes that he is in the process of becoming God, as our God is to us, is not a good and decent man, he merely has the surface traits of a well-bred cultist.
Romney is an absolutely, thoroughly, self centered man, who has no relationship to truth.
Look at who he really is, not who he became to run for the election.
Romney ran a “Johnny One Note Campaign”. Used a poison dart blow gun when he should have used a cannon loaded with grape shot because he had pleanty of stuff he could fill that cannon barrel with..
They failed to hammer away on what will happen when Obama gets returned; The Obama 2013/14 Tax Increases. The impact of Obama’s energy policies..(a socialist construct never branded as such) and a bread and butter issue which reaches every into “demographics” pocketbook...The impact of Supreme Court Appointments.. 18,000 new IRS agents and on and on. Including rampant corruption . Some were very briefly touched most weren’t and Benghazi was left to languish. Then there is Obama’s personal extravagance and behavior refusing to visit Nashville after its disaster showing up at New Orleans after Mitt visited it.
Instead we got a sales pitch on executive ability but not the reason why one should toss the old model and buy his.
In addition Rove who I understand was handling the Senate PAC campaign and played games. His material
never warned voters that if Obama gets re-elected as well as senate the chances of repealing Obama care ...AND ALL THE TAX INCREASES THAT GO WITH IT WILL NEVER GET REPEALED Let alone tie into or cover the formentioned grape shot which would have perhaps changed that body.
Finally they didn’t believe the polls which turned out were dead on. Even setting up focus groups which could have looked into what’s going on . Even to the point of going out to local eateries and bars and eavesdrop into conversations and pick up on topics being discussed.
Our local rural blue county GOP had at the outset good and growing attendence at their meetings 50 plus. At the meeting the Thursday before the election about a dozen showed up and I knew we were in trouble .
Nuts...This loss is inexcuseable
RINO File.
You have chosen dishonor to avoid war; you shall have war also.
That hits home.
Personally, I think that posterity may look back at this as a close call for Republicans. And for crying out loud, is it too politically incorrect to be an optimist?
It looks like a lot of Republicans -- enough to matter -- essentially felt the same way FR and JR did originally. Jim Robinson was right, essentially. Romney was bad all around and should have been dispatched years ago. Enough of "us" (I am one) thought strongly enough that we voted "none of the above," some of us for the first time in 35 yeas of voting. That means there's a lot more of our particular kind of Republican -- I would say small-government-Christian-moral-Republican-is-the-whole-point-of-being-Republican kind of Republican -- than we think.
That's good news right there, I don't care who you are.
And on top of that, the reality is that sans vote fraud, the election's outcome would have been much different. When will our side get it through it's trembling shivering watery guts, that the fact that Dems have to cheat so spectacularly, means we outnumber them?
That's a good thing! Cripes, we almost elected a Republican who, among other things, was responsible for law in Massachusetts that essentially used government tyranny to force adoption agencies to accommodate gay "married" couples as parents. We almost had, as our "brand" leader, a guy who invented and implemented the model for ObamaCare! A Republican!!!
Why the hell even belong to the Republican party if that's what you're voting for? And forget voting "against," that's a loser's game.
There's more of us than there are of them. Obama is loathed and fraudulently elected. He is weak and he is vulnerable. The imaginary hold consists of media image. It is like a mirror. It creates illusions.
Look, I'm sorry Obama won, but I'm glad Romney lost. No matter who is to blame, time moves on and this election just provided a lot of evidence that there's a powerful "silent" (or might we say "silenced" or "out-shouted") majority in this country that tends to agree more than disagree with FR.
And anybody who thinks that the majority of Americans are "children" who wanted to vote for "Santa Claus," are looking down wrongly on a lot of real good folks.
Chicago Way politics requires at least a 3-4% edge. Anything below that is fraud-worthy. I thought Romney ran a great, uplifting campaign. The Dems just outsmarted Republicans. I thought the Dems were running a terrible campaign after Obama’s weak first debate and Biden’s bizarre “Joker” debate performance. All the talk about Big bird, War on women, binders of women, etc. They weren’t trying to run a serious campaign. They were appealing to the “low information” voter. They knew they had that 47% and I think they did some serious data mining to drum up new voters for O to make up for the ones they lost. And they knew these new voters didn’t know anything about debt or the economy. But they knew what their “hot buttons” were and played it perfectly. So I feel worse now knowing that Dems sent the country past the tipping point by appealing to the lowest common denominator and my children and grandchildren will suffer as a result.
LMAO! Only a FReeper...
Cheers, RCat!
The lowest common denominator certainly played a part - a big part.
I can speak freely without excuse because I am lucky enough not to have children (a reality I used to curse and cry about) .
When someone who has much to loose and care for reviews a situation, it is through a certain lens. Understandably.
Your grandchildren will suffer. Though I have no skin in the game, I care about them. But having no skin in the game, leaves me honesty.
As it is, state size is a big factor and a history of actually delivering electoral votes to the GOP is secondary. That formula needs to be reversed. A state should start with the same number of delegates as their electoral votes and, after that, get additional delegates based on their actual ability to deliver electoral votes plus bonus delegates for those elected-- one per congressman, two per U.S. senator, three per governor and maybe three times the average electoral votes delivered to the GOP presidential candidates in the last 4-6 election cycles.
It makes zero sense that California would get more delegates than Texas when it consistently fails to deliver electoral votes where Texas consistently produces.
States, of course, would be free to up their delegate total by allocating delegates on the Maine and Nebraska system-- two for the statewide winner, one for the winner of each congressional district. The Pennsylvania GOP chairman pissed away just such an opportunity last fall. We had majorities in both houses, just such a bill introduced by our Senate Majority Leader and a governor pledged to sign it into law if passed. Chairman Gleason made sure it didn't get out of committee. We would have delivered 13 GOP electoral votes under such a system this cycle.
“Newt Gingrich would have pulled this off. He would have had no problem relating to the common, blue collar white guys that stayed home. “
You know this is persuasive. I had dismissed Newt because of the three marriages and false attacks the Obama machine would rain down on him.
But, they did the did the same thing to Romney with 87 percent negative ads anyway.
I wonder if Newt would been more aggressive in attacking the colossal failures of Obama and wouldn’t be tagged as super rich.
So true...
we had a guy in the trenches once who knew just how to wage political war...
Lee Atwater knew how to kick some a**...
and don’t you know the lib media loved reporting his death bed apology for being such a hard guy...
How I miss that man. Hadn't had an RNC Chair worth a bucket of warm spit ever since.
The election was stolen that is why this didnt make sense. And the GoP is too sissy to go after the robbers and obtain justice. God bless Col. West. Someone has courage.
If it had been I, I wouldn’t have “criticized Obama” nearly as much as criticizing Obama’s vision and plan. I would have called it nucking futz, though something polite enough not to be bleeped on the air.
Tonto replied, What you mean, 'we', white man?"
~~~~~
In our Texas County, "we" didn't let Romney down.
Romney's vote here was 74%!
What you mean, 'we', white man?"
Either way, they failed Systems Analysis and Design 101. Whether they tested it, but not at the volume they expected, or didn't beta test it at all, the failure is squarely on their shoulders.
The fact that they can't keep their story straight as you're pointing out is another matter entirely.
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