The story behind Mitt Romney’s loss in the presidential campaign to President Obama.

The Boston Globe ^ | December 22, 2012 | By Michael Kranish

[US Navy Vet]

It was two weeks before Election Day when Mitt Romney’s political ­director signed a memo that all but ridiculed the notion that the Republican presidential nominee, with his “better ground game,” could lose the key state of Ohio or the election. The race is “unmistakably moving in Mitt Romney’s direction,” the memo said.

But the claims proved wildly off the mark, a fact embarrassingly underscored when the high-tech voter turnout system that Romney himself called “state of the art” crashed at the worst moment, on Election Day.

To this day, Romney’s aides wonder how it all went so wrong.

[Gaffer]

Ideologues...

[Graybeard58]

When the candidate for the party, the GOP, that is supposed to stand for some type of moral correctness, decides that he will just come short to supporting the Democrats immoral position on both Abortion and the Gay Agenda, it's not voter stupidity, IT'S CANDIDATE STUPIDITY.

A Christian candidate with moral values would have won this in a walk and the primaries had several to choose from, the ultra left Romney wins with a plurality of the votes because of the plethora of much more conservative candidates.

I believe that many, many voters passed on Romney and voted third party, walked from the voting booth and promptly lied to the exit pollsters. Remember when president Kerry won all the exit polls?

Romney was/is and forever will be a liberal loser.

Next cycle, the "R" elite will hand us another liberal and conservatives and our nation will lose again. We know or at least suspect that part of the solution is to change the primary process by first getting rid of the all out of proportion in importance, first primary and caucus states of Iowa and Maine and allow only republicans to vote in republican primaries in all states.

I don't look for any of those reforms to take place and I will continue to withhold my vote from liberals no matter what letter they have behind their names. McCain was the last and I said "never again" and damn sure meant it.

[Morris70]

Tea party and christian groups stayed home and all the left wing groups ignored their differences and went out to vote.

[Vendome]

There was almost no daylight’s difference between Romney and Barracks on several important issues which begs the question:

“Why was Romney’s candidacy even necessary?”

The question aught to answer itself.

[Patton@Bastogne]

.


You "nailed it" ... Perfectly ...


I made the same comments in my NBC News interview during the 2012 Tampa Convention ...

predicting that "Myth Romney" would lose in a landslide to Obama ...



Of course, the Myth-Botts attempted to hang me in effigy for my comments (smile).



.

[ansel12]

“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to . . . run,” said Tagg, who worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency. “If he could have found someone else to take his place . . . he would have been ecstatic to step aside.

They are a family of trained liars (trained by Mormonism), Romney set out to take over the GOP 20 years ago and has spent at least 55 million dollars of his own wealth towards that goal.

Mitt sought the permission of his holy prophet in 2005, before kicking off the actual presidential campaign, and now after 7 years of watching his nonstop campaign, which ended in the predicted disaster as white Obama ran against black Obama, he tells us that he never wanted to run, he was just 'too decent' to refuse.

Romney created a lot of casualties with his scorched earth war against the right, the biggest one was probably keeping Palin from taking the presidency.

Romney despised Reagan and the right, and wanted revenge for their opposition to his father's and his mother's politics and political races, Romney even left the republican party in 1979, Romney has left the party confused, broken, and ashamed because he convinced them to sell their soul to his liberal agenda in the name of "electibility". How could a man who won a single election in 20 years of running, and lost that office when he left it with 34% approval and rejected for reelection, who had no natural base, and who all voting groups disliked and distrusted, be the most "electable"?

[gotribe]

Dinosaurs.

[gotribe]

There are three economic classes but only two parties. You know who gets screwed the most.

[ansel12]

Tea party and christian groups stayed home and all the left wing groups ignored their differences and went out to vote.

Evangelicals showed up and voted for Romney, so why would you post that?

[nathanbedford]

It is important for conservatives to understand the import of this article. It says that Romney did not lose the election for ideological reasons but for mechanical failures. Many FReepers no doubt will find this frustrating.

I have been saying since the night of the election loss that we must withhold our judgment about why the campaign went the way it did until we have data. The primary question remains, why did so few white voters bother go to the polls?

I think this article tells us a lot about why black and Hispanic voters went to the polls. It suggests that white voters did not go to the polls because Romney's rope a dope strategy permitted Obama to demonize Romney and the election was then and there lost. That seems plausible to me but what do I know? No more and no less than any other FREEPER with an ideological ax to grind on these threads. In the absence of data which tells us why our voters stayed home, we are just setting ourselves up for another fiasco by engaging in political onanism.

To the degree that we choose to believe it, the article tells some things that are obvious and some things that were not obvious to us at the time. For example, it was obvious to us that unanswered attack ads are poison especially for a candidate who is not already established in the minds of the electorate. I remember posting that it was far more expensive to try to unconvince people who have been convinced against you and then convince them on your behalf than it is simply to convince them in the first place. By not engaging Obama early on, Romney put himself in the position of arguing against the voter' s judgment for making a wrong assessment. That is almost an impossible sale. Without data, I can only say this is my opinion, but it seems to me obvious that the spending on television ads in the future will go on in the beginning rather more than at the end. As the Democrat said, he never saw an effective ad after Labor Day.

It was not obvious at the time that Obama had taken his ground game to a new level, that his level of technological innovation was light years ahead of Romney, that Romney's cyber war capability would be a fiasco, that Romney, who could have had access to the best polling and bogus group data ever, would permit himself to be misled. Apart from what that says about Romney and his vaunted ability as a manager, it tells us that no political campaign should be conducted when it is dependent on only one source of intelligence. No competent general would do it and no candidate should do it. In the future, a prudent candidate will engage a competing polling service to play the devil's advocate to his campaign manager' s polling service and require both sides to litigate in an adversarial setting the meaning of their data.

My conclusion from all of this is that the campaign for the 2016 election began on November 7, 2012, at least it has on the Democrat side, but one wonders what, if anything, is happening on the Republican side. Republicans seem to have decided to form a committee to tell them what happened to them. If Rino consultants form the committee I suspect Romney's Rino consultants will have little to fear from the report. I would much prefer them to consult pollsters of the style of Michael Barone to find out what happened precinct by precinct. But even Barone, as competent as he is, got it terribly wrong. So, I want dueling analyses of the postmortem just as I would in an ongoing campaign.

Since the campaign is already begun, Republicans should pay the price of attacking Obama beginning now and everyday for the rest of his term. Obama successfully ran against George Bush who was not on the ticket in 2008 and he was able to do it again in 2012, let a Republican do the same in 2016. But that can only be done if the predicate is laid. The predicate is an unremitting, unrelenting attack on Obama until the façade is finally eroded.

All of this, so far, has nothing to do with ideology. It does not say a word about whether Romney ran his campaign too far to the left or too far to the right.

This article and the data which has surfaced so far do not tell us what position we should adopt on immigration, whether we have to pander to Hispanics, or whether we should cling to the base. We simply do not know. It is no more proper for we conservatives to pontificate our doctrine than it is for Rinos to counsel cowardice. On the other hand, we can draw some conclusions about the mechanics.

We get ever closer to some understanding but we are not there yet. If this article is correct and we manage to draw the right conclusions from it, we will know that we failed mechanically. But will we know whether the right mechanics would have won given the ideological position Romney advanced? Was it lost due to his reputation as a Rino or was it due to his failure to exploit Benghazi and Obama's ability to exploit hurricane Sandy? Would Romney have lost worse if he had campaigned farther to the right?

I do not want that to be the case, I want it to be that the more conservative the candidate, the better the candidate's chances, but I want to know what is real not what makes me feel good.

Merry Christmas.

[rawcatslyentist]

Also amazingly Mc Lame and Moronmon both had NBC #2 invalidations.

Juan was berfed in a Panamainian horsepital & Myth's daddy was a Mexican.

This goes beyond coincidence. It is out and out conspiracy.

[xzins]

pouted at home.

What you folks never understood. They didn't "pout at home". They simply didn't believe him. They looked at Romney, looked at his record, and saw a pro-gay, pro-abortion, big government shyster. Scream about that all you want, but if you can't get past "pouted at home", then you'll never understand why they COULD NOT support Romney.

I'm from Ohio and there's no way that Obama stole Ohio. I'm in rural southern Ohio and the folks coming forward now to say they supported Obama blows my mind.

And thinking that something is sinister about Obama winning 99% of a 99% black neighborhood is math deficient.

Repubs controlled the governorship, the House, the Senate, the attorney general, the secty of state, and the Ohio supreme court. NO WAY they didn't have enough juice to resist shenanigans.

[research99]

It was better said years ago: “The vote cast by an ignorant voter, counts just the same as the vote cast by the informed voter.”

Considering the demographics of the US and the rigidity of the system under the present day Electoral College, the path for the Obama campaign strategy was obvious. Other articles detail how “messaging” was tested to work better with the target constituencies compared anything resembling the truth, so we heard “war on women” repeated ad nauseum contrasting with the silence of any coherent explanation on Benghazi.

The unanswered question is: Will David Axelrod be prosecuted for the illegal use of Census 2010 data within databases for the 2012 election?

[freekitty]

You bet. That explains why they were chosen for us. Both could be made to look like they had birth problems similar to Obama who has the real birth problem. It’s too bad they went along. Obama would have never stood up next to a conservative, that is a real one. They lie about that too. I bet most of the people never even knew they voted.

[Mr. Jeeves]

I do not want that to be the case, I want it to be that the more conservative the candidate, the better the candidate's chances, but I want to know what is real not what makes me feel good.

Amen.

[Soul of the South]

Some additional perspective on the demographic trends affecting the election.

http://www.mauldineconomics.com/outsidethebox

This explains the intensity of the Democrat/Media campaign, throughout 2012, accusing the GOP and Romney of waging a war on women.

[Marcella]

“It does not say a word about whether Romney ran his campaign too far to the left or too far to the right.”

I was dumped on when I said he wasn't connecting to voters - that he appeared to be a rich man who didn't understand how “regular” people lived. As a result, the “little people” didn't vote for him. The politically aware Republicans voted for him but politically aware conservatives didn't. He had no track record being a conservative but did have a liberal record.

Then, add the advantage of a Hussein better ground game, and Hussein won.

There will be another liberal Republican candidate in 2016, likely Jeb Bush. Make up your mind now whether you are a conservative or a Republican voting for the GOPe candidate.

I don't vote for liberals.

[itsahoot]

If there is proof, then we should be all over this.

When idiots trust electronic voting machines that let you touch pictures, it is all over, because the result will be whatever they want it to be.

There is no way to audit elections anymore, so you will just have to take what they give you.

It was her fault.

[hopespringseternal]

Romney ceded too much ground to Obama -- the 47% comment showed it. He fought hard in the primaries because he believed that he could reach primary voters.

He failed to counter Obama painting him as rich and out of touch. Even in the primaries he allowed himself to be painted as an elitist, but that doesn't hurt you so much with GOP voters.

Only in the first debate did he show any spark, then assumed from what his advisers were telling him that he should spend the rest of the campaign playing prevent defense.

He never successfully painted Obama as the rich elitist. He never showed voters the endless golf outings, the taxpayer funded vacations, or absurd motorcade. Swing voters forgot about 4 years of misery to vote against the rich guy.

[SoConPubbie]

I don't look for any of those reforms to take place and I will continue to withhold my vote from liberals no matter what letter they have behind their names. McCain was the last and I said "never again" and damn sure meant it.

Same here.