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Posted on 11/28/2012 11:48:31 AM PST by neverdem
With all the efforts to understand the recent election defeat, a lot of the focus has been on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and his campaign.
That is exactly the wrong way to begin analyzing the outcome of the 2012 campaign.
The focus on Romney as a candidate is profoundly misleading for those who want to prepare for future Republican victories.
Any analysis of recent Republican presidential results will reveal a systemic failure which can’t be ascribed to Romney.
The last clear Republican presidential victory was in 1988 when Vice President George H W Bush won with 53.37 percent over Dukakis.
Since then we have lost the popular vote in five out of six elections for president and dramatically underperformed in re-electing a president with the lowest margin in the history of presidential re-elections. (Other incumbents were defeated for re-election but none was re-elected with a narrower margin than President George W. Bush in 2004.)
Consider the results:
President George H. W. Bush lost re-election in 1992 in a three way race with then-Gov. Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. The Republican got 38 percent in a three way race.
Senator Bob Dole got 41 percent against President Bill Clinton in 1996.
Then-Gov. George W Bush got 543,816 fewer votes than Vice President Al Gore, but won because of a fluke in the electoral college. It was the fourth weakest winning performance in American history.
President George W Bush was re-elected with 50.73 percent of the vote in 2004. It was the weakest Presidential re-election in American history. This was against a candidate who on 53 issues averaged being in the minority position by 77 to 17 percent as a senator and whose record was more liberal than Senator Ted Kennedy’s.
By contrast, President Richard Nixon got 60.17 percent of the vote for re-election in 1972 and President Ronald Reagan got 58.77 percent of the vote for re-election in 1984. So the Republicans in 2004 were running between eight and ten per cent behind the norm for re-election.
Then Sen. Obama beat Sen. McCain in 2008 with the Republican only getting 45 percent and losing by 9,549,000 votes.
The defeat of Romney with 47.61 percent of the vote running 5,910,000 behind President Obama is about the norm for recent Republican candidates.
Instead of looking at the Romney campaign in isolation Republican activists and analysts should be looking at the culture, structure and system of the GOP and its consultants, people who are paid for campaign advice without long term institutional responsibilities.
Republicans need a thorough systematic lessons-learned approach because the problem is systemic rather than personality-based.
Any team which has had 20 straight years of underperforming ought to review the entire system and not simply focus on the newest scapegoat.
In the first weeks of our “Lessons to be Learned” project at Gingrich Productions, we have already begun to develop insights that are systemic rather than personality driven.
There are big problems from the failure to think strategically about issues, to the unwillingness to engage the proliferation of infotainment outlets, to the methodical failure to include minorities even when they agree with us on values and issues.
Over the next few months we will be issuing a series of reports on different aspects of the Republican failure to modernize.
As George Santayana warned: “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
We do not need to lose five of the next six presidential elections to learn that we have some serious thinking to do.
The Key letters are “VF” for Voter Fraud...
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When someone to the left of Bill Clinton can register republican in 1993 and 19 years later be the party’s nominee for President——while still campaigning against the party’s platform for being pro-life, call for homosexual Scout leaders and a gay military——and his only political accomplishments in a single term in elective office, being that he gave the nation gay marriage and Romney Care, and appointed 75% non-republican judges-—then something is wrong within the republican system.
anyone who can say bob dole, ghw bush, john mccain, and mitt romney, and not realize it is about the candidate to a large degree has no business commenting.
Each one of those candidates, and Romney worst of all, did not fight. Not only did he not fight, but he gave in on most issues. (With the exception of jobs...have you heard?...he can create jobs... 12 million of them.)
Romney is stopping by the White House to give Obama a verbal blow job...
and to get a pat on the head...
Wonder What he will swallow?...
This ventures into the taboo subject of third party politics & the notion that they cannot win.
This is pretty rich coming from Newt. Spending Sheldon Adelson’s money, Newt bled Romney dry and insured he would have no money to counter Obama’s summer ad offensive. By the end of it Romney had been fixed in the public mind as a robber baron.
I say T for Tea Party. Wake up the old silent majority, conservatives, what ever you want to call us and you will probably fined a landslide.
Yes, voter fraud did play a part, going back to at least 08, but the media played as big a part, ridiculing and demonizing any Republican candidate, while ignoring any bad publicity (Benghazi) from any Dem candidate. We have candidates that are not just battling another candidate, but the entire entitlement culture that is saturated with paganism and ignorance. Maybe we should have our candidates play the saxophone on MTV next time.
Gingrich is saying that that is the symptom, not the problem.
The problem is the primary system that gave us those candidates in the first place.
Second is the lack of strategic thinking between House and Senate leaders that contribute to the overall image of Republicans as uncoordinated and disconnected.
Third is the MSM environment that allows a Republican candidate like Herman Cain to be driven from the race based on the thinnist of innuendo, and how Republican candidates fall into MSM traps like the Akin and Mourdock comments on rape and the Rubio question on the age of the Earth, and how Republican leadership runs from those candidates in search of some MSM approval that will never come and is insincere when it does come.
-PJ
It will be harder to accept the argument that a third party cannot win when it comes from a major party that cannot win.
It begs the question of who is really the third party and who is a first party?
-PJ
No words for Santorum? He must’ve been your guy.
Advice from a guy that BLEW the majority in Congress with his ego?
Yeah, Newt has all the answers.
We've got to train our candidates that the media IS the enemy and cannot be trusted. They have to know how to answer the trap questions (a simple script taught to every candidate and never deviated from would be sufficient).
We need to campaign to the base. This country is still more conservative than parasite, even if we conservatives are demoralized at the moment. Reagan did not win because he was a great communicator. He won because he was unashamedly conservative. Romney lost because far too many of our people did not turn out to the polls. (That is, our numbers were not sufficinet to counteract the vote fraud that we knew was coming)
Pray for the democrats. Every one in office, and every one that voted for a democrat. Psalm 109:8-9.
Republican's can't win? This century they've held the House ten of fourteen years. They'll have held the presidency half the time. The worst they've done is with the Senate, holding majority only six years or fewer.
Show me a third-party governor, senator, presidential candidate success stories. Senate "independents" caucus with the Democrats.
Nixon lost to Kennedy because of voter fraud.
It’s time to radicalize America’s young men. Tell them the truth about food stamp fraud etc. Tell them that States should take back the power stolen by the federal judiciary. Make them mad - the women will follow.
The Republican base wanted Boehner to use his powers in the House to force concessions from the Senate, since the Senate won't pass a budget and is instead passing a series of continuous resolution funding bills. The House should have forced Reid into a budget resolution fight before the 2012 election, instead of letting the Senate kick the can down the road until after the election. Boehner caved on that point.
Second, Boehner let Obama into a debate that should have stayed between the House and the Senate, giving Obama a national stage for him to "look Presidential" at a time when he was looking weak and on the outside.
Third, as Boehner was beginning to go wobbly on his resolve to play hardball with Reid and Obama, the Republican base was forcing Boehner to take a hard line. Then, out of nowhere, Mitch McConnell offers up his Senate compromise of giving Obama the power to raise the debt limit subject to Congress voting to veto it. McConnell pulled the rug out from under Boehner for what gain, to appear bipartisan? to appear statesmanlike?
All McConnell did was show how the Republican party does not coordinate tactics, or message, or anything else in a strategic way. Republicans act as if they are all independent players acting on their own motives.
As long as we allow that to continue, Republicans will never win again.
-PJ
We all know some things that could be done about it but what will be done about it? My answer is absolutely nothing and I will continue to refuse to vote for liberals from either party, the last liberal I will ever have voted for was McCain, I learned my lesson.
We have people here who say, "never again" but they voted McCain and then screwed up again by voting for the loser liberal Romney. I believe that in 2016 they will do the same thing again, voting for whichever candidate has the "R" behind his name.
What G.O.P.e. candidate is in store for us in 2016?
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