If you care at all about the how and why the Romney campaign failed so miserably to turnout the vote, you have to read this entire entry by John Ekdahl at Ace of Spades:
What is Project Orca? Well, this is what they told us:
Project ORCA is a massive undertaking – the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election.
Pretty much everything in that sentence is false. The “massive undertaking” is true, however. It would take a lot of planning, training and coordination to be done successfully (oh, we’ll get to that in a second). This wasn’t really the GOP’s effort, it was Team Romney’s. And perhaps “unprecedented” would fit if we’re discussing failure. The entire purpose of this project was to digitize the decades-old practice of strike lists. The old way was to sit with your paper and mark off people that have voted and every hour or so, someone from the campaign would come get your list and take it back to local headquarters. Then, they’d begin contacting people that hadn’t voted yet and encourage them to head to the polls. It’s worked for years.
After giving you a blow by blow recount of this colossal failure that you must read, he concludes:
[T]he end result was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc. We lost by fairly small margins in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity’s sake. The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that.
Battleground Watch 
200 Comments
I know I just read that article earlier. It is absolutely stunning.
Words can not express how absurd all this is.
It is becoming clearer and clearer that as much as I admire and respect Mitt Romney, some of the key team around him were utterly useless.
and to back up what is in that article. I think we have already seen reports, even something posted at Battleground, regarding the smart phone and database software, which crashed!
At the end of the article it states, “Wrap your head around that”. Very, very apt.
We lost because 4,1 MILLION WHITE voters who voted in 2008 DID NOT vote in 2012. They were not the evangelicals. We lost FL, VA, OH and CO by 441,000 votes. The GOTV failed NOT because of ORCA, but because of poor GOTV efforts in those (4) states. IF a 1/3 of them had showed we would be saying President Romney.
Rush nailed it yesterday. It is hard to beat Santa Claus. The DEMS are the party of FREE SHIT. Mark Levin today had this brilliant stats lady from the Manhattan Institute who has sifted through the raw data and the FREE STUFF Party appeals to the poorly educated, unskilled Latin American immigrants. Obama had 8 million less voters in 2012 than he did in 2012.
They did it to the Indians (the Rez and handouts), then the blacks (got them hooked) and now the Hispanics. Why do you think they are for open borders.
Don’t you think the Dems would be building a 1,000 ft high wall on the border if those were 12 Million Poles, Czechs, Italians, Indians, Israelis, Greeks, and other whites crossing the border.
It wasn’t about abortion, pill control pills, War on Women, the economy, Iraq etc. It was Santa Claus promising Christmas every day for the 47% who ride in the wagon (The Takers) while he derides the 57% (The Makers) who are pulling the wagon.
We have to “Strave the Beast”. If you go online you can find some interesting ways to reduce your monthly taxes taken out of your check using the tax code (legally) and saving the amount you are not paying because you will owe that amount PLUS a penalty for underpaying during the year when you file.
Just imagine if the 59 Million who voted for Romney didn’t pay 75% of their taxes until January after the tax year ended, How much could you keep out of their hands for (11) months.
Hang in there
NAVYBLUE
This is an unmitigated clusterfck; however, let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. We need to do a better job on the ground (it should be starting now for midterms and 2016) combined with micro-targeting (thanks Karl) AND technology (not named ORCA).
I voted and attended the rally in PA. There was energy, but it was clearly wasted and not focused. POTUS knew where to focus his efforts, we hoped enthusiasm and dislike for the President to carry us over the top. I know this is a real butt-hurt but we can only cry for so long. That said, I’ve reached out to both Crossroads and RNC to discuss GO(P)TV 2014/16…to…crickets.
I can understand why to go digital, however, there are some activities that are best left alone. Strike lists are one of those items in a cmpaign best left alone. With digital, you need to stay on top of that with a constant refresh. Even a 30-second old list is already out-of-date by the time it fully loads on a monitor.
Yes, there is a need to go digital for sure. In many aspects. But then you should know when AND WHERE SUCH DEVICES ARE FUCKING BANNED SO THAT WE DON’T SCREW UP GOTV EFFORTS IN THOSE STATES.
How is this even a question.
And not only should we have strike lists, but we should also be marking down every f’ing dem name in philly precincts because there is no way they turned out 90% of their voters. NO F’ING WAY.
We need to stop this inner city fraud.
There is no fraud, you guys need to get over this once and for all. The more you spout “inner city fraud” the more you lose minorities.
Sign me up to help deal with fraud next time. I’m sick of it. There are verified cases of people voting multiple times in Florida, 2012. And well don’t even get me started about Illinois 1960. If it was possible back then, why not now?
To say there is no fraud is laughable, in fact it ignores election history all the way back to the founding of the country.
In short, there is ALWAYS fraud, there will always BE fraud. There was fraud in the 1700’s, the 1800’s, and pretty much every election election in the past hundred and twelve years.
The difference, is that fraud had limits. There’s only so many ballots you can be stuffed in a box before it runs out of space after all, and thats usually far less than what the victor wins by. With digital voting however, adding several thousand votes at a precinct isn’t anywhere near unfeasible, and if it can be done somebody has inevitably at least tried it. For this reason alone, we need to institute the ability to verify votes. If it turns out we never need it, great, but being able to conclusively know one way or the other is by itself worth the money.
Getting back to ID however, that sort of fraud is unlikely to change all but the tightest elections, but it really doesn’t matter. If one person is denied the right to vote because of fraud, thats one person too much. If one person gets two votes because of fraud, thats still one incident too many. We may never live in a perfect world, but voting is important enough that we should STRIVE for it.
Besides that, presenting ID is a very basic precaution. Most nations require ID before voting, for some reason we don’t require it here. I find it odd that the same people who insist we should be more like Europe, don’t want us to institute the same basic anti-fraud measures they use.
The ONLY half way valid argument I’ve heard about this, is that some voters may not be able to afford ID. Even that however, is rather flimsy. Not only does almost everyone need ID just to function in everyday society, but the cost of ID’s could always be subsidized for the lowest income voters. I mean, heck, they don’t even cost a dollar to actually make.
And besides all that, polling has verified that a clear majority approve of requiring ID to vote. Typically speaking, when a clear majority wants something to happen in America, it happens, eventually.
I think the thing that is most depressing about all this, and backs up what you have stated David, is that GOTV is all about “Getting Out The Vote”! That is the task, nothing else matters. Whatever works should be used, and if that means the old and trusted method, then that is what you use, just get the vote out!. To think we came all this way, and so close to victory and it gets thrown away, because of not only an over reliance on technology, but perhaps something that was not even up to the job. So time and effort was wasted on the most important day of the campaign. It truly is staggering. I must admit, just when I think I am getting my head around this, I just find it more and more incredulous!
Imagine if some of the pacs like Rove’s A,American Crossroads had spent 200 mil on GOTV instead of on endless tv ads that didn’t move votes.
Oh fundamentally, though this was a failure of strategy, i am not trying to wriggle out of the demographic doom that could be upon us, The GOP has some hard self-examination to undergo.
What deographic doom? Our side failed to get out the vote–particularly in blue collar districts–Santorum voters. I blame him in part. He was deep-sixing Romney when he had no chance to win in the primaries–then failed to endorse him or campaign for him. He held a grudge in other words–and his people held a grudge. I also blame the talk show gurus who attacked Romney blatantly–when it was
obvious to most level-headed people he was the only candidate that had a chance. The assumption that Obama was a pushover was never true.
So much riding on so little.
There was a huge confirmation bias…conservatives all listening to the same talk radio and Fox news shows and convincing themselves that everybody else saw Obama the way they saw him. The ” we could run a ham sandwich (or Newt, Santorum, or herman cain or whoever) and beat this ridiculous loser” feeling.
Santorum had one of the best convention speeches. It’s not his fault that people wouldn’t vote for Romney. You haven’t grasped how much Obama attacked Romney personally. ‘He’s not one of us.’
America didn’t die because of the failure of Romney’s “ground game”. This end was set in motion decades ago. To the people that chose slavery over freedom, revenge over love of country:
Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
—Samuel Adams
Please, America did not die. The more crazy conservative views (ban abortion, no gay marriage, change Medicare to vouchers system) died, but that’s good news.
Peter, read my below comments. Evangelicals are not going to give up. We will pray more, and evangelize more. I suspect it will become a lot easier to win people to Christ when the obama economy goes over the cliff and a depression sets in.
I will NEVER, EVER compromise on Abortion (the murder of unborn babies), Marriage (redefined by radical homosexual groups), Israel (I will never waiver in my support for Israel.
Sorry, I respect your views but talk of banning abortion in 2012 is simply crazy talk. If it actually ever happened the backlash would make this election look like a GOP landslide. And national gay marriage is a done deal, just a question of time now.
What are the nation’s thoughts on abortion Peter, since you know polls well.
I think you’ll be surprised as to what you find.
Prescient, that’s theoretical. If you actually managed to get rid of abortion, actually make it illegal (as it is in Nicaragua under Ortega today!) it would destroy the GOP.
That’s why Reagan talked the talk but never walked the walk on this.
The problem with these issues is that they should be decided at state level, not Federal or the Courts. If these things were just left for the states to decide, it would resolve the issue for a lot of people.
Theoretical? It’s simple. No fed funding for abortions. Let the states decide. Nine people with robes do not make law.
End of story. Divorce personal belief from policy. The voters of each state can rely on their conscience.
Pro life is pretty much near the majority view. But people find it “shocking”. Please. people become more prolife as science advances.
What is shocking is the left’s point of view, frankly. The script needs to be flipped and ask one of these commies exactly what restrictions on abortion would you support????!!!! Then we find out who is the radical.
Peter go away bro. I dont post of kos
aj, if you want to ban commenters get your own blog.
Peter, gay marriage will not be tolerated in red southern states. It may be good for you up north but us down south don’t like it. Over 30 states have it banned in their state Constitutions There is no compromise with the left, it is either their way or you’re a bigot or anti-women. Obama played that well, but he lied as usual
Peter,
To call opposition to gay marriage “crazy” shows how you live in a bubble. Until this year, every state that had a chance to vote on it, voted against it. While abortion is a losing issue for Republicans, and they are smart to avoid it, I know of very few, and certainly not Romney, that expressed any strong views on gay marriage. As matter of fact, Obama came out for it just a few months ago. Is he one of the crazies you had in mind? From my perspective, it is an age issue. People my age still feel uncomfortable with it, but the younger people are more libertarian on the issue. At the same time, except for commited leftists such as yourself, I don’t think there are many Americans who think opponents to gay marriage are “crazies.” My bottom line is that there are more important issues than that, and I think we have to “grow” as Obama did. The country is moving that way, and I’ll gladly do that to keep smug liberals such as yourself from continuing in power. I disagree with Obama’s policies, but I don’t think he is evil, nor
“crazy” because I oppose him. It’s funny because most conservatives don’t need to call opponents stupid or “crazy” while disagreeing with them–perhaps we’ll call them smug, but not crazy.
Gay “marriage” simply comes down to a word. Call it what you want but the word marriage is a reserved word. If the gay community would come up with whatever word they wanted call it mirrage or carriage it doesn’t matter but you can have all the benefits and frustration that comes along with two people professing their love to each other yet one is in front of God and the other is a lack thereof. Call it something else.
We don’t have to concede a damn thing. This was a status quo election. The other side did not improve its share of the electorate. Everything was static–except we didn’t get out our people. The idea that we have to become democrats in order to win elections is ridiculous. This was no more than what happened to the other side in 2004. Then they came roaring back after the hated Bush was gone. We’ll do the same. Watch what happens when the excrement hits the fan with Obamacare once it’s enacted. Buh-bye, Democrats.
“national gay marriage is a done deal, just a question of time now.”
Not until you convince a number of red states to do that and that will take not just some time, but a long, long time if ever. This should be a state issue. But this is a perfect example of why/how state issues become national issus because the people behind these movements will push to get as much as they can. It’s also an example of why elections matter despite what this poster goes says and mocks people for their concern.
Meanwhile, with FL in O’s ledger, Romney could have won both PA and OH and still lost the election. 332 EC votes in this day and age is a lot.
Obama lucked out in part through a storm. His vote was way down. But ours was not what it should have been because of a lousy lengthened primary season. In fact I feel good about this, better than I felt yesterday because I had thought the alignment had occurred and we’d never win another election. Now
I think we will fight another day. Obamacare is a problem–but there are some 32 cases pending in the courts so even there things are not absolutely clear. Neither is what the states will do now that so many are in Republican hands with the SC giving them choices to make. The whole mess is still up in the air. The
Market is tanking, joblessness will go through the roof, recession is just around the corner. And 2014 comes quickly–with oodles of vulnerable Dem senators at risk.
http://paradine.org/?p=764
The true facts are the Republicans will NEVER get the black vote, never. I would not even try. However, Latinos tend to be more socially conservative than the other minorities. Fourteen million evangelicals are not registered to vote. This is irresponsible on pastors parts. I would start now and get every single evangelical registered. The GOP needs to do this. Work with pastors ,start now..not right before an election. I supported Rick Perry in the primaries, i believe he would have received a lot more of the Latino vote than Mitt did. He probably would have won, but what is important to people now is a good speaker, free cellphone, abortions and birth control. THe GOP needs to match the dems in early voting, start NOW. We have the numbers, i refuse to believe there are more dems than Republicans and Independents. Marco Rubio should be nominated in 2016 and he should start the ground game..NOW!
Oh, we can get the black vote, someday. Maybe, two, three decades down the line, possibly. Latino’s should be an easier block to make progress in, IF we can stop offending them for five blasted minutes.
Latinos will never vote Republican as long as they are “Latinos”. The democratic party is a coaltion of groups who are against traditional America. The anti-American left has corralled minorities by convincing them that they are excluded from traditional America. In modern tribalist America, there are too many advantages to being part of a privileged group too ever consider aligning themselves with the “white” party. The die is cast. There is nothing Republicans can do to attract nonwhite voters. Republican acquiescence on immigration ‘reform’ will only make the democrat majority permanent and speed the transition to a single party state.
jas, Mark Levin was talking about that tonight. I do not believe in illegal immigration. I fear Obama and Reid and even Boehner are so polarizing we may split the union. 1860 all over again but this time over abortion, gay marriage and the ones who want income redistribution.
the black vote used to be Republican. from the end of the Civil War until around the 1960s. it could happen again. probably not anytime soon
Jas, I’m sorry but this is patently false in every way shape and form, period. Hispanic voters are not, “anti-american,” there are two reasons and two reasons only why Hispanics typically side to the left, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Anti-Americanism.
First and foremost, is the simple fact that Hispanic voters are predominantly lower income. Democrats ALWAYS have an advantage among lower income voters and Hispanics are no different. If you look at ONLY middle and upper income, they vote for Republicans at a rate more in line with Caucasians. Not AS much as Caucasians of course, but its far less of a block once you get out of the lower income brackets.
The second reason is simple perception. Democrats have spent decades trying to convince all minorities that Republicans aren’t concerned about minorities, and that our actions on several issues are tantamount to racism. The problem is, that we play INTO this perception. Look at your OWN comment, I’m a white caucasion, conservative Republican, and even “I” think that sounds racist!!
Look the fact of the matter is, that Cuban Americans in Florida tend to either split their vote or vote Republican, and that Hispanics in Texas sometimes vote up to 40% Republican.
The reasons for this are, rather simple. The Republican party of Texas regularly reaches out to Hispanics, and knows how to talk to them without offending them. They still typically lose the vote, but 40% is a heck of a lot better than 30%. As for Cuban Americans, a larger percentage of Cuban Americans have had time to acclimate to American culture. They’re somewhat higher income than Hispanics in general, and are somewhat more Americanized.
That is something else to keep in mind, 3rd, 4th, and 5th generation Hispanics tend to behave and vote more similar to Caucasians than 1st and 2nd generation Hispanics. Heck, the birth rate of third generation Hispanics is almost identical to Caucasians. They still tend to be somewhat more socially conservative than the rest of the population in general by the 3rd or 4th generation, but otherwise they are culturally a lot more similar to Caucasians by then.
So, think of it like this way. It’s only a matter of time before more his panics reach the middle and upper income brackets, only a matter of time before 3rd, 4th, and 5th generation Hispanics outnumber 1st and 2nd generation Hispanics. The trend-line for the Hispanic vote is actually very favorable, TO US!
But, we have to start NOW! If Democrats get ninety percent of the Hispanic vote like they get with African Americans now, it’ll take generations to even have a shot with them again. It’s easy to dismiss a political party if your father, grandfather, and great grandfather all describe them as a bunch of racists that are out to get Hispanics.
So the very first step, is to freaking STOP INSULTING THEM! Seriously, this is so basic its practically elementary, you’re never going to win somebody over if you spend all your time demeaning them!
So the solution is simple.
Step 1: Actually COURT the vote. Be polite, friendly, and treat them like actual individuals that you care about, not some foreign invader!
Step 2: Find an equitable solution to the immigration issue that everyone can live with. The base may have hated him for this, but guess what, BUSH WAS RIGHT!! We need a solution to immigration, and there is no practical solution without a path to citizenship, or at least worker visas! Securing the borders would get rid of some illegal immigrants, but not the vast majority that are already here, and we are simply not going to round them up and export them. I’m sorry but we’re not, the political will isn’t there! Sixty percent of Americans believe there should be a path to citizenship, with numbers like that it’s going to happen, period!! We might as well get on board, find a solution that simultaneously secures the border, and start repairing our relationship with the Hispanic community!
Step 3: Outreach! We already have a couple prominent Hispanic American politicians, a couple more would help. Hispanics won’t vote for candidates just because they’re Hispanic, but just seeing a few less white guys in our party would make it more approachable. Simultaneously, we’ve got to start running ads in Hispanic communities, and not just for national elections. We should be reaching out to the Hispanic community every chance we get. It won’t make much difference in a single election cycle, but we’re not looking at a single election cycle. We’ve got to play a long game here, we’ve got to look twenty years into the future. If we improve our margins with Hispanic voters by 2 to 5% every four years, we’ll manage to stay slightly ahead of the demographic shift, and twenty years from now, they may actually BE our voters!
But the bottom line is this, we’ve GOT to appeal to minorities better, or as a party, we’re doomed! Improving turnout only helps so much when your segment of the population is shrinking, the same can be said for increasing our share of the caucasion vote. Even if this helps with a single election cycle, you’re only temporarily outrunning the inevitable.
For that matter, what happens if DEMOCRATS make inroads into the Caucasian vote? We simply cannot rely on a single racial demographic, even IF it is still the predominant demographic for the time being. So long as African Americans vote in a block, and hispanics lean heavily towards the left, we’re always going to run campaigns from a defensive position, and its EXTREMELY hard to win national elections like that!
Spirit,
How do we get the contact info of all those evangelicals not registered to vote? That’s the first start.
Obama effectively leveraged rallies on campuses into getting college students registered and bused to the polls.
With evangelicals, perhaps we need to work on similar church-centered activities.
http://wethepeopleshallspeak.com/evangelicals-plunge-america-into-darkness-mislead-polls-and-stay-home-on-election-day/
I don’t understand why they stayed home. I know a lot did. I voted for RR in Virginia. The stakes were super high. I did read today that 14 million evangelicals are still not registered to vote. I will find the source. However, how did he peel off 28% of Evangelicals? My gosh, we don’t hate Mr Obama but gosh, he has made it plain that he does not like us. I pray for him but i am not happy with him. I supported RIch Perry in the primaries. He is not a good speaker but a good man. Liberals were scared of him because a lot of Hispanics like him due to the Texas Dream Act, i don’t have a problem with what they did as long as it is not on a national scale.
As I have been saying all day, the evangelical movement is steep decline. Young people have left the church in droves, older people are now dying off, not being replaced, and some have defected to the Dems for various reasons. If Murdock and Akin had made their stupid rape/abortion comments ten or fifteen years ago, they would have gotten away with it and been elected in those states. In fact, the liberals would not have made an issue about, fearing an evangelical backlash. Today, evangelicals no longer have the numbers to back up our candidates. As for evangelicals not voting, it’s not true. Instead, they no longer exist.
It’s a complete myth that Latinos are socially conservative. Their social indices (crime, out-of-wedlock birth, low educational attainment, support for liberal ideas, church attendance) are absolutely hideous. They are not as hardcore Democratic as blacks, but they will never be a win-able constituency.
You don’t have to win them, you just have win over enough of them. Bush got 35% in 2000, and improved that to 40% in 2004. If the GOP is not reaching out to the people on Bush’s team that helped make that happen, there’s a problem.
Part of what made that happen was a massive housing bubble largely engineered to get the Hispanic vote. The long-term consequences were….not good.
I still remember all of Bush’s speeches, and some regulatory meddling, designed to get more Hispanics to buy houses they couldn’t afford, with the idea being that they would become bourgeois republicans.
I think our goal should be to raise our share of the total Hispanic vote–the way Bush did. That’s doable with the right candidate.
Trux, you are correct. I was informed tonight on Levin that Hispanics are big believers in big government just like blacks. You think maybe an economic collapse may do well when Uncle Sugar isn’t there to help.
I’m Black, I’m here to tell you conservatives will never get the Black vote. At best they can do is get Bush ’04 numbers with us 11-15%. Blacks actually made the difference for him in Ohio.
Someone mentioned the fact Blacks voted for the GOP up to the 60s. This is a popular myth. Blacks started moving away from the GOP in the 30s and 40s under FDR. FDR got about 75% of the Black vote. The Dem party of the 40s had as one of it’s major constituencies Southern bigots. We often hear if the GOP wasn’t so racist maybe they’d get more Blacks yet we have historical evidence that Blacks voted for Dems by wide margins even when they openly touted segregation.
The fact of the matter is that most Blacks are left of center and have an affinity for the federal government, not because as some conservatives crudely put it we want handouts but historical reasons.
Also the same dynamic is at play with Hispanics. Romney won California whites but because so many Hispanics are left of center the state just voted to tax the rich guys. I can’t even think of a Hispanic country with a system of economics that remotely resembles capitalism except for Chile. The GOP is playing with fire with this amnesty business but I guess it has to be done.
Part of the epic fail was brought on by the right wing media. When every poll shows Romney was losing, they kept insisting to their voters that he was winning, and would win in a landslide. While on the other hand, you had the Obama campaign who was very cautious, yet working the ground game hard.
I think the talk show hosts did too much bashing of Romney early on during the primaries. It stirred up a lot of indignation and anger–which only made a bad primary season worse. And it all went on too long–with Santorum calling out Romney on health care and going for the jugular. Lots of damage was done before Romney could even get his campaign off the ground. The results are showing we lost this race because of what we failed to do, not because of what Obama did. Obama lucked out because of the stupid party’s incompetence. We even fell into the trap of allowing liberals once again to make us look like fools in endless Network debates. It was a circus that damaged our brand.
Yesterday, it seemed like Rush was confronting some hard truths about the electorate and its receptivity to conservatism. I only heard a few snatches of hsi show today but it seemed like he reverted back to “true conservatism always wins” philosophy. In other words, we don’t need a rethink and a serious analysis of what went wrong, we just need to double down on the base and scream it louder.
The fact that conservative primary voters actually thought people like Newt and Santorum had a shot to win the general shows how much self-deception and cocooning there really was. And the damage done to Romney (because he had to basically spend all his money to win the primary long after it should have been over) was incalculable, as you say.
More or less agreed. We need a right wing media to counter the left wing media, but we need the right wing media to be, EFFECTIVE! Instead, it has just galvanized the base against absolutely anybody who has stepped one foot off the reservation, no matter what the reason for that was.
The thing is, I actually DO think we should double down on our core message, because our core messages are actually pretty popular.
Pro growth economics, POPULAR! This is what Romney focused on the entire campaign and he out performed the rest of the GOP field by a wide margin! If he hadn’t been dragged off message by mudslinging, and social issues, he would’ve won handily.
Fiscal Discipline is POPULAR! Seriously, nobody LIKES to think they’re irresponsible with money. Even democrats tried running on fiscal discipline this year!
A strong national security policy is, once again, POPULAR! What isn’t popular are wars, but if people think you’re going to maintain a strong defense without being aggressive you’re in a good position.
Less government, is, despite belief to the contrary, POPULAR. Nobody, LIKES to think they’re dependent on the government, and nobody likes bureaucrats or the IRS.
What we need to reconsider, are the issues that have used as wedge issues against us. Is anything that can be used as a wedge issue for us. For example, socially conservative issues have to be repackaged in a way that makes them seem more innocuous to more secular voters. That doesn’t mean we drop them, just make them less immediately noticeable. We also need to reconsider our stance on things like immigration, like I said elsewhere tonight.
Live free…nobody knew because 2008 was a wave election, basically nothing changed 2 days ago. It is back to game, set.
The techies in the Obama campaign must be LTAO (that LOL but stronger words).
Well, the way I see it is that everybody now is trying to monday morning quaterbacking this election and guess what guys? Nobody knows for sure anyway………For me, I believe is a combination of things. I think the Democrats had done a better job GOTV their base by firing up those people in the Unions and getting involve targetting particular demographic voters. Also, I believe we have to fight really hard to make sure we secure the way everybody votes in every state by creating a voting database with a voting ID, etc, so that way we make sure that people who are not qualifed to vote do not rig the election. (See some particular counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Virginia, Florida, and some other States that had 400,000 register Democrats, but somehow 600,000 voted). We have to get smart like the Democrats and start right now to prepared for the next presidential election by targeting and GOTV the Republican base, getting our message better, and fighting, fighting, and fighting the Federal government bias for voter ID.
I think if we all work hard and we get our base back in tune we should be able to go back and win elections…………..there should be not way that Obama lost about 9 million votes and we still lost the election because 2 or 3 million more Republicans did not got up their lazy couch and voted. If I were the Republicans in the Congress I will put a priority for the next 2 or 3 years the voting ID act, and we will make sure to communicate to Obama that nothing will move in congress until that vital legislation is done. That’s how you do it people, we going to have to work HARDER, otherwise there will be not country left for our generation or the next one.
Our base never was in tune to any large degree, just barely enough to get by in the Reagan and Bush years. Social conservatives, libertarian and other fiscal conservatives and so-called “neo-con” defense conservatives don’t really have too much overlap. The only thing that united them in the past was a common enemy. Each of them has to shed some of their agenda. That means social conservatives not focusing on nanny-stating personal behavior other than abortion which affects a 3rd person, i.e. trying to stop gay marriage, weed and gambling. Libertarian and fiscal conservatives trying merely to restrain the welfare state instead of end it. Defense/foreign policy conservatives not trying to “nation-build”, i.e. just get in and hit ’em and then wait in a safe base until the next time. And all 3 groups accepting some form of worker visas and amnesty without obsessing on the legalities of the illegals already here.
The two wings of the conservative movement are incompatible. One wing has no problem with expanding government and increasing the amount of goodies and handouts. They loved Bush W and viewed him as a conservative. They viewed Romney as a moderate–or even a liberal. The other wing is horrified at the federal debt, at the bloat and the spending and the number of people with their hands out. They did not view Bush as a conservative at all.
A lot of the people some bloggers call conservative are really populists with socially conservative views. A lot of the people some bloggers call moderates are really fiscal conservatives with laissez-faire social attitudes. So we need a candidate in the future who can bring together these two wings of the party.
National voter ID law may be difficult. Historically, running elections has been something left up to the states. It’d be hugely ironic if you see California or New York or some place challenging it on 10th Amendment grounds, but it’d likely happen.
I’d say that we in the South are still chafing under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act so they should suck it, but who knows what a liberal administration or the Supreme Court might say.
The arguments against Voter ID are laughable. People with no driver’s license can easily get a state ID and need one for a variety of other reasons. And it only took seconds for my ID to be looked at and the picture compared to my face. Some state needs to test the matter now before the composition of the Supreme Court changes.
Well, you got a point, but we should still fight Obama administration every time WE in the states pass a voter ID law but it gets turn down with the help of the Justice Department. So is a matter of give and take now, if we don’t fight for this laws, we are going to continue playing the same game with the Democrats and we are going to keep losing close state battleground elections because of fraud. There is not way in hell that there are 400,000 register Democrats in a particular county, but yet we lose because 600,000 Democrats voted.
I think there’s lots of blame to go around within the party. The tea partiers were fed up with the Washington -based establishment and the establishment fears the tea party. Rush pushed the idea that the establishment chose Romney–and that idea might have stuck. We’ll wait and see what comes out in the days ahead.
This is not exactly Monday morning quarterbacking. This is important information for us to know if we’re going to remedy what’s wrong for the next time around.
Although GOTV is only part of the (losing) equation, surely part of the blame goes to the RNC. In fact they are the ones who usually run that show aren’t they? And Obama’s success with GOTV in 2008 is attributed to his campaign not leaving to the DNC. It is one thing not to let the RNC run it if they cannot do it effectively and the campaign can.
GOTV necessarily has to start early, which means before the primaries determine the actual candidate. So that does mean the RNC is to blame for that. I suspect that both the RNC and Romney campaign placed too much faith in PAC sponsored ads that were broad shots instead of microtargeted.
Part of Bush’s success in 2004 was that they started working on the GOTV plan just after the inauguration. That’s just the natural advantage that an incumbent has.
And hence why the national committee needs to bird dog it when we’re out of office.
Fact of the matter is, Romney came close. Essentially a hairs width in all the states he really needed. As such, innumerable things COULD have made a difference. We can make a list of fifty items, and as close as it was knocking any one of those items off the list might have made the difference.
The real question is, why did, “Republicans,” perform so badly. Romney came pretty close, but he uniformly outperformed Republican party candidates across the board. Republican candidates lost, even in deeply red states that we carried handily two years ago.
The more I think about it, the more I think its the media. Lets take the primary for example, it was ultimately the media that decided to start the primary cycle so early with debates. It was the media that focused on the debates so heavily, the media that endlessly replayed every Republican gaffe in the primary, the media that focused in on the issues that would become the war on women meme. It was the media that nationalized Akin’s comments, the media that pounced on Mourdocks comments, the media that never failed to repeat a Republican gaffe, and the media that routinely covered for Obama on each and every single issue.
You want to know my theory. I think we did make a huge amount of progress between 2008 and 2011. Then the media decided that they couldn’t allow this and spent a solid year trying to make us look like clowns.
Granted, we make it easy, but if they wanted to make the democrats look like clowns it’d be just as easy.
It is multifactorial indeed. And although the media is partly to blame in not holding Obama accountable for failures, to harp on the matter only makes us look worse.
But a large factor in the swing states is the propensity of so many voters to split tickets, which is something I have never understood. They need reasons to identify more with the republican party than either the democrat party or neither. And it starts with a unified fairly simple message at the state and local levels.
I disagree. At a local level, people can understand Republican message. Control of $$$$ so it doesn’t explode. Anyone can understand that $$$ you put into local taxes equates to better schools or more local work.
At a national level, people don’t care about $$$$ cause they don’t see it. They don’t comprehend that $$$ goes toward…… No one see’s the day to day utilization of the taxes, and therefore they could care less.
The problem with the Repubs is multifactorial and isn’t just about message. It appears that its a bunch of white-rich guys that will sprinkle in the occasional minority rich guy. Ohter factors are that there isn’t a cohessive RNC group working to form a centralized database to ascertain turnout.
For many many years, the Dems were the party to throw something on the wall and hope it sticks. In the past decade, they have utilized technology and coalition building to enhance the gap they have in RV. Until the repubs can generate a non-election year RV drive, then its not going to matter. The Dems will out preform the repubs. Personally, I think the great ole party is dead.
I believe you made a crucial point, the media had a big play in the Obama reelection. See we have too many people in America missinformed and illinformed, ignorant of what is going on or what is important for the country over all. We have to come up with some ideas of how to get our message out……………..
Jon, I disagree that the GOP is dead. This year can be explained is much less apocalyptic terms.
First.
Where we lost the worst was the senate, and that is a simple matter of fielding bad candidates. It’s not like we cannot run successful statewide candidates, the GOP dominates the governors races after all.
Second.
Despite being largely outnumbered by democrats, we took remarkably little damage in the house. We’ll probably control it by an even larger margin than before after the next mid-term election.
Third. Our presidential candidate came incredibly close to winning, despite the fact the the media was actively cheer leading against him. People are looking at that D+6 figure and hyperventilating, but honestly I think that number is a little misleading. From what I’ve read the number was D+4, before leaner were factored in. For some reason, right leaning independents are less willing to identify themselves as leaning Republican, and I suspect that is mostly a factor of how badly Bush and the Media have damaged our brand over the years. Even if they heavily favor us over democrats, its simply harder to admit that they identify with the party right now. Had we had a better turnout, the gap would have been narrowed further, though its hard to say how much exactly.
But think of it like this.
Our candidate was smeared for months, couldn’t start seriously campaigning until two months before the election date, was opposed vehemently by the media, ran into horribly bad luck in the form of a Hurricane that boosted his opponent in the final days, and still came within a hairs width of beating an incumbent President. Yes, it should have been easier given Obama’s track record, but his base was always going to support him no matter what, and his advantages largely canceled out his track record.
With all that in mind, its not that bad. We need to do a little better with GOTV, a little better with minorities, we need to give the media less to work with. The GOP has a lot of little flaws, but nothing structural, and those little flaws obscure a lot of hidden strength.
If we make a few little improvements, we can easily make the map go as red as it was in 2004. We just need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot constantly!
The only thing that really gives me pause is the fact that the democratic party was able to make the electorate look more like a poll of registered voters. Obviously they cannot do that in off year elections, when voters are slightly more apathetic and there isn’t a singular face to run against, but that makes Presidential year elections considerably more difficult. This is why we need to improve our own GOTV, and to improve our performance in one or two key demographics. That still falls under the category of subtle tweaks however. There’s nothing to suggest the party is structurally broken.
Get ready for Marco Rubio in 2016
Couldn’t be happier. Hopefully Rubio cruises to the nomination and he can set up his ground game and campaign. This guy actually is a really good campaigner. I remember after he won the GOP Senate nod over Charlie Crist, the first thing he did was set up a huge ground game. Didn’t mess with the ads, just dumped a ton of money in the ground game and wound up crushing his Democratic opponent on his way to the Senate seat.
What’s his message? Same as Romney’s with a Latino face on it? Not enough.
I don’t agree with you on that. I believe if we start now preparing our message and getting it out, fitghting the voting ID act with Obama administration, and we get our base out to vote, a person like Marco Rubio will have better success. Remember, Obama is not going to be in 2016, so the black vote is not going to be so fired up anymore and Rubio believe it or not can bring a lot hispanics to vote for him. Now, still is not going to be pretty, because remember one thing, the MEDIA………we have to fight and fight harder.
Hardly. By the looks of it, people just didn’t think Mitt cared about them. The insensitive corporate CEO image/Bain couldn’t be shaken. Not really fair but it was what it was though Mitt is a really good guy. Rubio isn’t anything like that.
My point is that the messenger is only part of the equation and the message needs tweaking. I.E. the same old message is not going to cut it.
I don’t agree with that all. One could argue that the last 6 presidential campaigns came down to who people liked the best, not necessarily what their policies are. Look at Bush and Obama. Voters overwhelmingly gave them the nods over their opponent in the “person I’d most like to have a beer with” category. The person means more to most than what they stand for. That’s been proven.
Rubio is a true conservative. I like him or Rick Perry. Rick Perry will be all healed up from his back surgery in 2016 and can sharpen his debate skills. We need to get in the gutter with the democrats and fight hand to hand combat. MItt kept saying Obama is a good man, no, Obama is not a good man. He is flat out wicked. I honestly hope he is impeached over Benghazi. John Boehner has to go, Maybe Ryan for SOTH?
Maybe turnout is not the problem?
http://www.tnr.com/blog/electionate/109949/there-arent-many-missing-voters-it-seems
BadPeter,
That’s a reasonable article and Sean Trende basically just did a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Only time will tell. But that author’s definition of “slight” may be different than ours, i.e. even 2% down when expected to be up makes all the difference in the entire election if it is in the battleground states.
How about I’m GreatPeter?
“Slightly,” may still be too much, yes. Though I’m not sure the blame should entirely be on the Romney campaign. The RNC and numerous SuperPacs engaged in GOTV efforts, and if the best all of them combined could do is merely match 2008, then clearly our parties basic assumptions about GOTV must be thrown out the window entirely.
My take on it, too many groups relied on advertising, and advertising just isn’t effective after the first few months of a campaign. People just tune them out after awhile, assuming the don’t use the DVR to skip the whole thing.
They also made a lot of phone calls, but this has a similar problem. A lot of people ignore all calls from numbers they don’t recognize, which means that calls are more likely to hit the small number of voters that don’t screen calls numerous times. Because these voters get the calls numerous times, they tune them out. If you’re going to make a phone call, make it once just before election day, and offer to set up a Van ride to the polling place if they don’t have transportation. Otherwise, hitting voters with robo-calls and advertising just isn’t effective.
One area where the Romney campaign does have to be congratulated on, is early voting. They did a much better job on early voting than McCain in 2008. Will still need to make more improvements in this regard however. Democrats have obviously upped their ground game to the point where merely closing the early voting gap slightly isn’t enough. If we’re not already at a dead heat with democrats by election day, than its going to be a big uphill battle to reach the finish line first.
I actually emailed Sean Trende about his theory (which I would like to believe). I started by asking, “Didn’t most of the polls right before the election show the Republicans to have a significant advantage in enthusiasm? If so, why didn’t they end up at the polls?” To this he replied, ” I think these were soft independents who might have voted for Romney had they shown up, but unknown.” To that I countered, “So if we assume partisan percentage of D+6 (FoxNews exit polls), and a low turnout for independants, then wouldn’t we see a higher than expected turnout for each of D and R and a lower for I? For example, 41/35/24 (D/R/I). Yet haven’t the exit polls showed something like 38/32/30–a rather normal turnout for Indies, rather than a decline?” To this he replied, “Very possible. We will know more when the final exit poll data are made public!”
As I say, I would like to believe his theory because inadequate GOTV operations are easily correctible. In contrast, it’s much harder to counter major demographic shifts: either you do a factastic job of selling your beliefs to this new voting block, or you adopt a message with which the block agrees. The former is highly preferable; the latter simply means the Republican party becomes Democrat-lite.
Maybe this has been posted already, but in response to the link below how can we start a national movement to PURGE this bozo from the Republican party? I know New Jersey elected him but he is TOXIC on a national scale and we need to eliminate him before he does anymore damage 😦
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/333039/christie-called-obama-after-he-won-katrina-trinko
He doesn’t need to be purged. He’ll never make it past NJ now and probably knows it. Senate might be his only rung left.
Yup one thing both parties can’t stand are turncoats. Booker will clean his clock maybe he thinks an Obama endorsement will shield him from the inevitable monster Black turnout Booker will garner in an off election year.
Doubt it Booker has been a loyal Obama ally. Christie is done as governor and has no national GOP profile.
Christie will re-emerge in 2016 as a 3d party candidate for Prez. He has the outsized ego of a Ross Perot and I envision he thinks he’ll have credibility as someone who can work across the aisle. With luck, he’ll split the liberal white vote with the Dem nominee.
“Christie will re-emerge in 2016 as a 3d party candidate”
Where’s he going to get the money to do that? Mom and dad? Naw, he may try but he won’t get far. The only thing he could do is become a dem.
Very interesting and telling map here: http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president
Click on shift from 2008 to see what counties went less Dem/more Rep & less Rep/more Dem
Naturally with much less votes for BHO, there are quite a few red arrows. Interesting part is where the blue arrows are – deep south.
Well guys it begins………..ELECTION HAS CONSEQUENCES……
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2012/11/08/obama_administration_partners_with_the_un_to_attack_the_second_amendment
Yep, we going to have to work HARDER……..
STILL, something is just not right about the numbers. During the early voting period, every report I read demonstrated how our early voting numbers were exceeding 2008 numbers. Every poll showed higher Republican enthusiasm. Mitt was drawing great crowds. How could the numbers just tank on election day?
Like you said the numbers don’t add up…………we have to do better if we are going to win another election for that matter. Voter ID is a must, a purge of unelectable database, and last but not least a sofisticated program that allow us to get or GOTV. We should start doing that right now and get well prepare for the next one.
I know you guys don’t like conspriacy theories but there is a lot eveidence over the last two years to suggest that this election, at least for president, was a show. Obama was always going to get 8 years like Bush.
Adviser: Romney “shellshocked” by loss
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57547239/adviser-romney-shellshocked-by-loss/?tag=socsh
This just underscoress how clueless he is. If he is truly shellshocked that means he didn’t know how to get the right information to prepare appropirately. And why would you want that guy involved in running your government?
Looks like there is some push back on missing voter meme. Maybe the demos have changed and the GOP has to adapt or fine tune it’s message as a result.
Keith you are going to kills yourself if you keep this up. Romney lost by 3 million votes, and would have needed 4.5 million votes 750,000 of which being in 4 key states to pull off a convincing win. It wasn’t a GOTV failure on Romney’s part. Even if those 30,000 knew what to do he would have still lost.
Given that turnout was below 2004, you pretty much have to conclude that people literally didn’t care who was president. A lot of that had to do with Obama relentless 6 months of attack ads that he used to suppress voter turnout either because he was able to trash Romney or just wear out the electorate.
Was Obama better organized? yes every incumbent is always better organized. But he didn’t win the election just through better organization alone.
I will add that this isn’t the end for the GOP. Despite Obama’s organization he still shed about 8 million voters from his 2008. That is 8 million people that have clearly come to different conclusions about politics. Are they going to run to the GOP? not necessarily but its promising. In addition, unless BO can solve the depression raging though Black youth (and he can’t) the dems are going to be in serious trouble firing up the Black vote without another strong minority personality type. Remember Obama has demonstrated a startling inability to win an election for anybody but himself.
True…even with the best turnout operation in history, he didn’t get that many more votes than John Kerry and John McCain did in losing.
Absolute numbers don’t matter. % of total votes cast matter. What’s that number? Romney was down, Obama was down…chances are voting was down which still makes Obamas numbers comparable to 2008.
He will end up with about 50.5% it seems, a littlle bit lower than Bush in 2004.
On the bright side, after 4 more years of Obama, his terrible policies, economic collapse? He will cause people to scatter from them. Obama fatigue will set in and Hillary is toast. The Benghazi investigations are starting and if had a speaker without mash potatoes between his legs something good may come out of it. I think the 4 murdered deserve justice. Chris Christie is finished in the GOP. He will lose his big for reelection on Jersey and be gone. He needs to check into a hospital to lose weight before something happens to him. He is way to fat.
It’s nice sentiment but you have no idea what’s going to happen over the nexy 4 years. The dow could be 16000 come next election and housing could be a lot higher and dems will be seen as saints and sweep the election again. You have no idea. This is just extremist republican, empty promise talk.
Dave,
What happened over the last 4? Unemployment is going to go higher by all estimates. In fact, over 8% will become the norm. You Clinton worshipers, people had Clinton fatigue in 2000. Gas prices are at record highs, the taxes of Obamacare kick in and people really see what they bought. You’re in a dream world Dave, this nation is toast if we are not spared by God. I see a sweep alright, 2014 GOP of the Senate and a bigger lock on the House, maybe BHO impeachment over Benghazi…so yea..you’re right, nobody knows but God. We’ll see, don’t go hedging bets.
http://flashtrafficblog.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/more-than-6-million-self-described-evangelicals-voted-for-obama-why-what-else-do-the-exit-polls-tell-us-about-how-christians-voted/
Romney still carried evangelicals 3-1.
That’s a net of 12 million votes.
It would be hard for the Republicans to abandon that group and stay competitive.
To put this in context, people are talking about the Latino vote – Romney won a bigger percentage of the evangelicals and there twice as many as Latinos.
And you can bet that Dems will do all they can to keep letting enough latinos into the country to maintain their voting edge. If I was a non-latino immigrant that would piss me off because there are other more qualified individuals that are not latino that want into this country that could benefit the braintrust of the country. The only problem is that those people typically don’t stay poot and not as reliable when it comes to dem votes.
This article says what many of thought the last few days of the campaign – Romney “knew” he was going to win – and so did his staff.
Problem is, it’s OK for us to be wrong about the electorate.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57547239/adviser-romney-shellshocked-by-loss/
It doesn’t really matter.
1) He actually preformed better on the campaign trail once he felt that
2) He pushed hard all the way to the end
3) He wasn’t going to beat a D+6 electorate without that last week of media coverage, which didn’t happen because of Sandy
4) And if Sandy really changed voters mind like the exit polls seem to suggest he was divinely @#$#@ anyway
yeah it was pretty obvious. i don’t think PA, mn, wi were fake outs as many say
Ultimately, the black vote carried Obama to victory. Michelle was hitting every black college in Va, Ohio, and Florida. They were getting them registered, busing them to the polls. Black radio, social sites and yes the churches, were also involved. I did here some white christian conservatives in Va, say they couldn’t vote for Romney bc he is a Mormon. I wonder how much did that really hurt him in the end? Sad. Romney would have made a very good president.
Wow, it seems that he haven’t learned anything. I came to this blog because I am a combination passionate Romney fan and propellerhead number cruncher. Let’s not come up with conspiracy theories or talk about how the GOTV efforts failed. We lost because we failed to recognize that the game has changed. America no longer belongs wholly to the white man. We could not show up in enough numbers this year and in 2016 it will be completely impossible. 72% White electorate in 2012 and 69% in 2016.. Do the math. By 2020 Texas will be a swing state. Good luck winning an election if you lose California, Texas and New York.
We lost because:
1. We refuse to acknowledge the fact that Hispanics are here to stay and that they are a significant part of the electorate.
2. We refuse to marginalize the anti-abortion crowd. Women hate them and they are 54% of the electorate. Listen, if you want to outlaw abortion, you have lost. You will never succeed. It is a ridiculous fantasy. Republicans should abandon this stance entirely. Do not even mention Roe v. Wade. It is the law of the land and will always be so. Trying to overturn Roe v. Wade would be political suicide.
The problem is that it is nearly impossible to get the party nomination if you are soft on immigration and pro-choice. I propose that we fiscal conservative/social moderates GOTV at the 2016 Republican Primaries. Not only has the overall electorate in the US changed, but the Republican Party composition itself has changed. I believe that fiscal Conservatives outnumber social Conservatives and I’m going to be doing what I can to make sure that WE nominate the next Republican candidate. Call him/her a RINO. Call him/her a liberal. That’s just fine. We need to do something to win. You all can stick to your guns if you like, but I think allowing the Democratic Party to operate unopposed will be Hell on Earth.
Couldn’t agree more. It’s like a bunch of toddlers screaming that they want their way with social issues. They aren’t going to get it. So, are we in this to win elections or is this just a bitch session? if the second,i’m out of the Republican Party. I’m tired of losing.
You guys act like the religious right doesn’t vote.
If you just tell them to pound sound, you won’t have to wait until 2020 for Texas to be a swing state.
If Texas wants to go Democrat, then so be it. At least the possibility of a resurgence of the party in coastal areas will exist, where none does today.
By Kevin, join the democrats because the Evangelicals that REAGAN brought to the GOP are not going anywhere. Stop your whining.
Nixon struck the deal because it was an election winner in 1968 and 1972. It continued to work until 2004. Now, it’s done. It’s time for the Republican party to move on from the past. The demographics have changed and we’re not even a majority christian nation any longer. The social issue hawking is unsustainable. If the party can’t cleanse itself, it will be divided. Totally tired of losing and none of your insults will change that.
I don’t disagree changes need to be made.
But you say you are sick of losing.
I’m just not sure how you alienate, say 6-10 million voters and still compete.
Spirit,
I’m not making these numbers up out of thin air. 69% White electorate is reality. The White birth rates have been down for a long time. The old White people will die and the huge amount of Hispanic youth will become voting age. Your comments reflect the reason we could not propel a strong candidate to defeat a weak incumbent. If we continue to mold our policies on emotion rather than facts, we’re no better than the Democrats.
[dodges rotten tomatoes]
No, seriously. It’s true. No better than San Francisco Democrats.
This blog is about analyzing numbers. We were wrong about the tea leaves. The hard facts have come in. Times have changed and will continue to change. Any mathematical mind can see that GOTV will not work in the future. The Republican Party must change with the times.
You know, I was coming around to line of thinking yesterday, but upon further review I don’t think we can just tell the social conservative wing to F’ off. The evangelicals came out, it seems, but some people that aren’t evangelicals but still church-going, devout values voters stayed home. Those were the sort of votes that Palin brought out, and they would probably have won us this election.
Like I said in an earlier comment. We need to let them know that yes, we are the party of ethics and morals and we still stand up for them. But they also need to get it through their thick skulls that you cannot legislate strong families, strong communities, strong churches. That’s something that comes from the people at the bottom, not the government at the top. And that yes, you can be a fiscal conservative without being a social conservative or vice versa (ask the Europeans – France was under the control of a full blown Socialist Party in the 70’s at the same time they were cracking down on abortion), unlike some profess. And that -yes-, you can hold those beliefs personally without trying to legislate them onto others.
Opposing gay marriage is a wrong side of history proportion. I feel strongly that as science advances and we better understand life in the womb, the GOP’s position on abortion will be on the right side of it. But that time is not yet now, and Roe vs. Wade is not on the table. Neither is banning abortion nationally. Remember that Obama’s position and the Democratic platform on abortion is more extreme than what most of the country feels right now. Chip away at that. Make sure they understand that partial birth abortion and third-trimester abortions are basically infanticide and that the Dems support that, because the average person does not. The way you win this battle is by being intelligent and picking your battles, and never using the words rape and God in the same paragraph ever.
*Proposition, ‘scuse me.
Let me be clear. I am the son of Methodist missionaries. I am the softball coach at our church in the suburbs of Houston. My positions do not come from disagreement with the Evangelical far right. My positions come from a sincere desire to prevent the Democrats from leaning further left. I should make it clear that I “accept” gay marrige, lack of prayer in school, abortion etc.. I do not want or agree with these issues. I am merely a number cruncher who does not espouse views based on emotion. I believe that the Republican Party must change or become a minority party, incapable of providing meaningful opposition to the far left. a RINO is 1000% better than Code Pink. They are the enemy, not me. Please assist me in defeating them.
Why doesn’t the GOP leave social issues to the states then? Isn’t that an even compromise? I don’t believe the white electorate is now 72%, it doesn’t change that fast in 4 years. Why did blacks go up when they are flat or declining due to the highest abortion rates? What gives?
Let’s face it, a rich older white guy can not win the presidency. I fought tooth and nail to stop Romney from getting the nomination. We need to nominate young latino social and fiscal conservatives or Herman Cain? What’s wrong here? Romney was a flawed nominee, he got hit early last summer over Bain and the auto bailouts and he never responded until he clinched the nomination. Team Romney failed not the lower white electorate. Read the latest from Karl Rove.
Nobody caters to white males in the republican party. Women keep getting duped by the dems abortion message. There are crackpots in the dem party that think abortion should be legal up until its full term, which is appalling to nearly everybody. But that isn’t going to be policy in this country anymore than no abortion, no exception will.
Problem is you can’t convince women, that will likely never have an abortion, that some opinion that some individual person may have won’t actually matter. The end result is you lose 2 Senate seats because people aren’t looking at the bigger picture.
Quite frankly, I am beginning to think the republicans are too big picture. We keep talking about things that people don’t want to hear about. Fiscal responsibility and all the tough choices that come with that.
Meanwhile the dems just say a bunch of pet projects to demographic groups
1) we support gay marriage (gays)
2) we support strict environmental regulation (environ nazis)
3) we support free healthcare (single women)
4) we support more money for urban services (Black)
5) we support more teachers (public sector unions)
6) we support immigration reform (Hispanic)
7) we support more regulation (big business)
We are hearing lots of why the loss came due to a lack of moderation and too much social issue baggage.
Let’ see…we tried a 72 year old Security Republican distrusted by Social Conservatives from the West with a fit 44 year old libertarian leaning reformer from a state bordering Canada who was thought to placate the social conservative wing. They lost.
Then we tried a 65 year old Establishment Republican from the North East who was distrusted by both Social and Fiscal Conservatives (and the crossovers especially). We coupled the nominee with a fit 42 year old libertarian leaning reformer from a state bordering Canada who was thought to placate the social and fiscal conservative wings. They lost (with fewer votes than the first pairing).
And the lesson?
The party is too tied to Southern evangelical social conservativism. As John Cleese would say in the Cheese shop sketch, “explain the logic underlying that conclusion!”
Obama won by playing to the strength of his party and selling himself to those outside based on his charm. We need candidates who FIRST and FOREMOST play to the strength of the party, then have enough charisma to sell themselves to those outside.
McCain was a patriot and Romney a good family man – but both represented the moderate wing of the GOP and therefore had to placate that wing in the primary and thus had far too much ground to claw back to get the center. If your base trusts you, and you have charm, you can project the happy face of conservatism (not the “severely conservative”) beyond your base and build inroads into new blocs. Reagan, Clinton, Obama, and Huckabee all had/have that skill set. Huckabee is very unlikely to run or be embraced by the bag men of the party. But until we recognize that we only win by growing the base through “conversion” not accomadation (as Reagan did) then demographics will become destiny. We must have someone who can both argue AND persuade others toward accepting enough of the “package” of GOP core values to vote for them. Abandon the CORE, or puting forward another lackluster personality are individually fatal to our election chances and in concert fatal to the survival of the GOP as a competitive party.
EDIT: but both represented the moderate wing of the GOP and therefore had to placate THE CONSERVATIVE wing in the primary and thus had far too much ground to claw back to get the center.
Both of your tickets gained when they announced the VP. McCain Palin took the lead to the point where the Obama campaign thought about withdrawing from Ohio.
Well, why don’t we try putting the fiscal conservative at the top of the ticket? Most of our fiscal conservatives still support a strong military anyways, so that’s a twofer right there. Besides, Ryan may not be as open about it, or make it his main focus, but his social conservative credentials – especially on the topic of abortion – are rock solid. Catholics and southern evangelicals are not hugely different on those topics, after all. He’s definitely not the sort of person that gets the Northeastern Rockefeller/Establishment Republican label. Maybe from the Libertarian Party, but not from the GOP rank-and-file and the Tea Party. Jack Kemp was the same way.
The appeals he can make with the GOP’s core values are the ones that can make us the greatest inroads among minorities (and the working class, although the white working class is increasingly becoming either ours or nobody’s, rather than voting for the Dems) without resorting to playing identity politics with minority candidates, I think. Huckabee and Santorum may be embraced by the southern evangelicals, but they’ve got very limited appeal outside of that. Huck had no success outside of Iowa and the Deep South, and it wasn’t because the Establishment was working against him.
Kyle, you said it well. The Republican Party cannot have two major line-in-the-sand idealogies and win. Pick fiscal conservatism and back off on social conservatism, or pick social conservatism and buy off electorate segments until we bankrupt the country, winning some elections until we lose our future and it doesn’t matter anymore, just like the Democratic Party. I prefer the former.
If you want to pick off minorities, you are better off doing it with social conservatism.
MikeN, “picking off” electorate segments by race (or other characteristics that individuals cannot choose) is a liberal approach. Attracting a larger number of ambitious (and other characteristics that individuals can choose for themselves) people irrespective of their race, etc., is a conservative approach. If the Republican Party chooses the latter approach, that’s a Republican Party I can be excited about. If it’s about doing what the Democrats do, then it just gets down to lesser-of-two-evils election by election. The country needs an exciting Republican Party.
People still don’t get the point, though. They think that if they just get out the vote better and stick to their guns with social conservatism, a new Ronald Reagan will make everything better. Get it through your heads people, the country changed. It isn’t like the America of our childhood here. We need to change our message to meet the oncoming demographics and to spread a message of fiscal sanity to a disparate population. Absent that, the party will be a permanent minority.
What happens when you live in an echo chamber:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/11/shellshocked.php
Peter, you’re walking up to that line of coming to the site and talking trash. It was a spirited campaign and Obama won. Bring more to the table than slights of the Romney campaign. I’ll do that plenty on my own.
it’s not talking trash. The election is over. The point is that it seems that the Romney campaign never understood what was going on. If true, this is huge. It’s one thing to motivate the base by being very optimistic, it is quite another to believe it yourself. don’t you want to make sure that your team has good data?
Keith,
we are all shellshocked, and the last thing we need is to have people ungraciously rub it on our faces. This is a site for conservatives. Can you please ban him. If this was Dailykos or any liberal site, we would banned in a second.
No need to ban him. He’s offered plenty of good counter-factuals that balance out his moments of reflexive lefty troll posts. I’d rather he stay and keeps his posts more discussion driven rather than the ungracious comments as you describe.
Let’s ban him? How silly is that. Peter makes a good point. How can a campaign at such high level not have good data. It makes no sense. So, if you don’t like something someone says, ” ban him”? Get real. I am glad you are not in control.
I saw the article too and my mouth was opened. They need to oust the people who were doing their data analysis so they are never hired again.
Peter – I appreciate your thoughts and don’t want you banned. However know that this is a deeply hurtful situation for us (people that believe in freedom, indidvidual initiative and goals). So we will regroup and address our deficiencies as a party. Frankly I believe that had it not been for the bitter primaries we would have won. The hurricance, we would have won. No Christie (no thoughts for 2016) we would have won. No Obama negative ads for 6 months (before we had a candidate), we would have won. And lots of other less important reasons – we would have won. BUT WE LOST. So you can crow, but we careful “my friend” as Biden lilkes to say….
demographics
72% White electorate in 2012 and 69% in 2016.
In 4 short years demographics do not change that quickly. The black vote did not win BO the presidency. It was Mitt Romney. He let Obama tarnish him last summer with ads that went unresponded. He beat himself. White turnout was down. Black reproduction is flat. The only group going up are Hispanics.
Who Romney lost 70-30.
And apparently the solution is to import more of them. While telling a large bloc of Republican voters to go away.
Keith & others – First off, GREAT site. I have been reading it for the last month daily (hourly the last week up to the election) and the discussion has been very civil and well thought out on both sides. This is rare on the internet these days, especially for a political site in a very polarized election climate like this year. I would like to add a few thoughts to what has been going on the last couple of days here though. First, as a lifelong Republican I too was very surprised by the loss (and in particular that we lost my home state of Florida). However, as an Accountant, I gotta say a lot of the conclusions being reached post-election are wrong according to the numbers. First off, Romney will end up beating McCains final total by at LEAST 2 million votes and will come close to, if not beat, GWBush’s 62 Million total in 2004.
As numerous articles have pointed out today (on RCP and elsewhere, plus just look at Fox’s election results and see how much % vote is still left uncounted) there are at least 7 million votes left out there and it could be higher. This is due to mail in states, the problems in the Northeast from the storm, provisional ballots, California still having 30% left uncounted, etc.
So the vote that Romney got was NOT the problem, besides losing obviously. Like I said, he will either beat or come very close to GW’s all time 2004 Republican high when all the votes are counted. That was an R/D EVEN year when Bush had the power of the incumbency, 5% unemployment, a housing market bubble that hadn’t burst, post 9-11 security issues in his favor AND the Democrats ran a rich white guy – hardly appealing to the Obama base. It is not “missing” White votes for Romney. Everybody here and Josh Jordan (numbersmuncher), etc felt that if Romney won the White vote by 20 points he’d win. He won it by 22 points (61-39).. Obama is the one who ended up losing White votes, not Romney. Romney got some of those and others – mainly White College kids and likely some disappointed liberals/suburbs didn’t vote for him in the same #’s as 2008 (but they weren’t going to switch to Romney or ANY Republican, they had simply got caught up in the 2008 wave and just didn’t vote this time). Obama’s African American, Latino & “other” votes however went UP by roughly 2 & 1/2 million votes though. So even though he lost roughly 6-7 Million White votes his overall vote drop will only be about 4.5 Million. He will end up somewhere in the 64 + million range, down from the huge all-time wave of 69 Million (7 Million more than GW’s high), but still the second most EVER. The premise that was wrong here (& I admit I thought it too) was that he couldn’t possibly beat the all-time high turnout from those groups in 2008 with Unemployment up amongst those groups more than Whites and with the Right track/Wrong track #’s, etc. But those groups don’t believe that – they overwhelmingly still feel that Bush is to blame for the economy, not Obama (the exit polls show that). Add in that they don’t want anything “taken” away from them and they voted for their guy by bigger numbers than 2008. We were simply wrong on that, it happens unfortunately.
So, before we jump all over Team Romney – who many here last week felt was running a great campaign (and please – Rick Perry, Santorom, etc couldn’t have come close to his Denver debate performance), I think we need to acknowledge sometimes you just get beat. These guys are from Chicago and they KNOW how to turn out that vote demographic for that kind of candidate. He won’t be running again in 2016. Our party is not doomed by demographics. We need to change some things, but we just had a historic midterm victory and kept the House in spite of a D+6 electorate. We would have been even in the Senate if not for the inexcusable Indiana and Missouri losses, so we ended up minus two. As upset as I was Tuesday night and I admit I felt “sick” – it simply doesn’t do any good to now attack the guy who will probably end up with the 3rd most votes for President ever (behind only Obama in 2008 & 2012).
I think the main thing we do need to work on is Reagan’s golden rule of not attacking other Republicans. The primary cycle this year was particularly ugly. Christie (the storm) and Santorom (not backing Romney) put their own agenda’s above the party. Ron Paul didn’t throw his support to him either. That can be fixed in the future though hopefully.
I definitely do not in any way feel that all is lost because we ended up with a different demographic turnout on election day than we felt we would….We were wrong in that assumption, as was Team Romney’s VERY respected pollster. But criticizing our candidate for our false assumptions isn’t productive.
I was proud of the campaign Romney ran and am still very proud that I voted for him. I believe he is a genuinely good person and American….The outcome of the election won’t change that for me.
I was thinking about this earlier today. Romney was the best candidate we could field. I think he would have been a top 5 President, really. As for Santorum and Perry, it would have been 60/40 popular vote and an embarrassing electoral vote loss. Santorum was way too far right and Perry would have been viewed as Rick W. Perry. Compare Romney’s outstanding debates vs. Perry’s uhm, uhm, uhm..
i have been a Romney fan for many years, so I’ve taken this loss much harder than i do most losses. it would be interesting what he can do with his experience. i think he could have been a top president too.. as long as he was able to handle and work with Congress
Johnpk, Great post! You really nailed it when you said, “I think the main thing we do need to work on is Reagan’s golden rule of not attacking other Republicans.” I am sick and tired of this bickering with in our party. After Tuesday night, I have decided not to watch Foxnews anymore. I stopped watching the MSM TV after the 2008 election.
I am so proud of Romney and Ryan. God bless them.
As usual, Jay Cost nails it: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/morning-jay-barack-obama-and-triumph-identity-politics_662010.html?nopager=1
Enough whining. Look who voted for Obama- do you really think we will ever get any of these people to vote for us without handing them European socialism? Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, single women. I would rather lose than associate with these people!
Just how is “European Socialism” so different from what we have in the US today?
Did you know that the US, pre Obamacare, spends a gretaer percentage of GDP on publicly funded healthcare than most European countries?
The US is already, and has been for decades, a “socialist” country.
Peter – As I congratulated you earlier – are on the winning side. But how winning? Believe me the best talent is leaving and fast.. So you have the country now.. Be well.
Talent is leaving? Where to? Why do people keep arguing that the country will become socialist when, if you define socialist based on government spending, the US has been like many European nations for decades now.
If you look at countries across the world it is the poorer and less developed ones that have small governments. Guatemala, for example.
What goes on in Europe and here is better termed “Social Democracy” than socialism proper. But anyway.
Yes, I agree we are like Europe in many ways, but with some differences…
Our top notch credit rating has allowed us to spend and keep tax rates lower.
European countries seem better at vision and follow-through. They want to invest in high-speed rail? Alternate energy? They get it done. We do those things comparatively half-assed, Spending priorities shift too fast. It’s no wonder Americans don’t trust the government.
Yes they spend less on health care than we do, but the governments (in the single payer systems) dictate what they will pay for and what they won’t. In the US, we expect the latest technology, latest drugs. Practice defensive medicine running all sorts of expensive tests to avoid getting sued- It’s very expensive, and the healthcare system is an ugly mix of market and government control that seems to bring the worst of both worlds.
It’s hard to believe we can become more socialist, it will bankrupt us. The private sector needs to be expanded to increase the tax base. Any sane government under any political stripe will see that. We have huge Medicare and Social Security obligations to meet with the aging population. It’s insane to try to create other entitlements unless we want to go through nasty rounds of austerity like Europe is.
Peter – We will go to a country that appreciates business and entrepreneurship. It may be a slow but a deep burn for America. I am researching now.. Have fun here. Don’t forget to write…….
Christopher, the most technically literate and entrepreneurial parts of the country, like Silicon Valley, are all heavily Democratic.
California is losing businesses by the bushelful.
Part of that has to do with GOP social issues and the other part has to do with the makeup of the electorate. Silicon Valley loves their H1-Visas just as much as the Silicon Forest. There are reasons which these kinds of borad “correlation-implies-causation” arguments usually overlooks.
Talent may be leaving but there will always be Asian, Indian and Eastern European talent (at least in tech land) to take its place (and usually at a cheaper rate too I might add)
The bottom line is we lost.. You can’t deal with stupid people but ignorance – we can address. So we need to foster a system where the MSM is not how people make decisions. What does that mean..Research the FACTs for yourself or fund some entity that helps them get there. Look, I am not happy but this was a turning point for our country and we LOST. So adjust and overcome. We can’t give up. My hope is that the very nature of people is too improve themselves. If not, come visit me as I apply for Austrailian citizenship. The best will leave the country…. and they will only understand as they fight themselves for the last available TV…Be well my conservative friends, what we believe in is what they want, they just don’t yet understand….
Unrealistic. There isn’t another country you can move to which will give you what you desire. We need to fight the enemy here. It’s quite simple, view Hispanics as Americans and give up on abortion. I know it’s not ideal, but these are our best options.
“view Hispanics as Americans ”
Well I would add that if you’re going to do that that means accepting per their terms basically accepting all citizens in Mexico as potnetial americans at any time they choose.
Let me know what you find out Christopher….I heard New Zealand is superior to Australia.
regarding the numbers , remember the electorate has grown quite a bit since o4 & 08. The. 90-94 s are in & the older guys are not dropping off but living & voting .
Look at percentages. Even 7 million votes said to out there is a failePresident both parties & does not bode well.
A little off topic here … looking forward to 2016.
I think if she runs, Hillary Clinton wins the dem nomination almost by acclamation.
If Biden contests he’ll last about two weeks.
If Clinton doesn’t run, Biden is an obvious candidate, although he’ll be pretty old (73).
There’s no other obvious stand out choices on the Dem bench, unless I’m forgetting some (entirely possible).
And that certainly doesn’t preclude a less obvious but formidable challenger emerging – it’s happened twice in the reasonably recent past (Clinton and Carter).
Clinton’s not going to run. She’s done in politics as a candidate. Her age is an issue and people have already heard her best and rejected her.
@housebroken dad As usual, Jay Cost nails it: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/morning-jay-barack-obama-and-triumph-identity-politics_662010.html?nopager=1
“In 2016, the Republicans cannot allow the Democratic party to get away with this tactic again. It must nominate a candidate who resonates, on an essential level, with the values and identity of the heartland. Since World War Two, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush all managed to do that, and each won twice. There is a lesson there for the GOP.”
So, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Susan Martinez, Condi Rice need not apply?
Pretty cynical.
He does have an important point. That is -the base- of the GOP, essentially, and you cannot win without -the base-, since just peeling off enough Latino votes to get back to 40% is going to be an uphill, multi-year battle, to say nothing of turning them into a primary constituency.
They don’t necessarily have to be from the midwest, they just have to have a connection to them on some level, especially in values. Given how well Rubio’s speech at the RNC was received I’d say actually fits the bill perfectly, at least on that front (experience and policy making is another question).
Name me a moderate Republican that was elected/reelected since 1996
Ford Failed
Dole Failed
H.W. Bush Failed
McCain Failed
Romney Failed
Ronald Maximus Reagan WINNER, WINNER, WINNER
Conservatism always wins out. Look at all the conservative/Tea party people that won at the Federal and state level in 2010. We have 30 (R) governors now. Each state that elected a (R) governor in 2010 either has reduced unemployment in their state or has come close to balancing their state budget.
Conservatism always wins out IF you know how to present it and to NOT let the Corrupt Media define it.
We are the CHAMPIONS of liberty and economic freedom, NOT the Democrat’s Socialist/Progressive party of USA,
America will rise out of the ashes like a Phoenix and crush the bastards who try to deny us FREEDOM !!!!!
NAVYBLUE
More or less agreed, though to be honest on that list of yours, I’d rate Romney as the most conservative of those moderates. The Bush’s were darn DARN fond of Big Government, as was Dole, and Pre-Reagan Republicans were by in large even worse so, there goes Ford. Romney, had one pretty big mark on his record, but he was otherwise much more conservative than the rest. Less of a spender, a staunch defender of free market economics (sans Romneycare,) and a big critic of anti-competitive union practices, particularly government unions.
Not saying he didn’t have his flaws, like I said, Romneycare was a pretty big mark. He was the best of the lot among the primary nominees however, and the best among those of that list of yours.
Just trying to give the man a little due at this point. He worked his butt off for all this, so he deserves that much at least.
Romney’s argument for Romneycare was that the state was already spending a ton of money reimbursing hospitals for treating uninsured patients in ERs, so why not use that money to help insure them instead? The idea was to be cost-neutral rather than increase government spending. I’m not sure if it worked out that way, but that was the idea.
Ronald Regan was a moderate by moderate standards. Bush Jr spent money like a liberal and went to war like a conservative.
Name one extremist conservative that has made it past the nominating convention? Cue up the cricket chirp….that’s right NONE, EVER! There’s a reason for that but the extremists can’t accept that.
A few points if I may…
1) Romney is a Mormon, and I believe many republicans stayed home, rather then voting for Mit.
2) It is much easier for the democrats to Get Out The Vote, for a simple reason that most minorities (who overwhelmingly vote democratic party) live in the inner city. It is much easier to reach this demographic then going into rural areas (which have mainly Republican voters). Take a look at Pennsylvania for example, nearly all the counties went republican, besides a few and of course besides Philadelphia, which had over 300,000 more votes then Romney!!! Philadelphia is one of the smallest counties scale size but has the most people living in it. So as you see it is much easier to get out the vote in these inner cities.
3) The GOP must reach out and even more, must educate the Latino population how the GOP can be and in fact are a better party for them.
4) And if that fails,,, then there’s this….. Create a way that The Latino citizens create their own 3rd party candidate.. This way it will be a much even playing field….
1: As close as it was, that could’ve played a part. I always knew some people would stay home because of this, but always figured that he’d be able to make up for it by performing better among independents than any of the other primary candidates. Thats probably still true, but it would’ve been nice if nobody stayed home for that reason.
2: This is undoubtedly true. This is also in part why I think we need to chip away at minority voters. If we could even hold the margins down in a little in urban areas we’d be able to compete in states like California. That’d wreak havoc on Democratic GOTV efforts. It’d open a lot more paths to victory for us, so Democrats wouldn’t be able to focus their efforts on a dozen counties in three states to deny us the white house.
3: Agreed, we manage to occasionally get 40% of the Hispanic vote in Texas, so it’s certainly possible to at least blunt the democrats advantage among that voting block. Part of the problem is that our parties immigration stance is used as a hispanic wedge issue by democrats. We need to take that particular weapon away from them so we can actually start making progress.
4: That could work, but only once. The spoiler effect all but guarantees that any emerging third party only runs once before fading into obscurity. I might note however that funding third parties isn’t a new idea. There has long been a suspicion that at least some of Ross Perot’s run was funded by democrats, as a means of breaking the Republican run of controlling the White House.
Course, once is all you really need. Clinton was able to take that opening and create a legacy thats been a boon for his party for over a decade. We DESPERATELY need to get a successful Republican into the White House soon, to create a similar positive legacy for our party. Part of the reason we don’t do as well among younger voters, is because the bulk of them have no memory of Reagan, the last really successful Republican President.
One thing I think is hard to argue with–the nominating process is broken. If we have to have another 20-25 debates to beat up each other, and have the fringe Ron Paul supporters not support our nominee, we might as well pack it up now. If a Santurum were to win the nomination, we would lose by 10 points, and I say that a hard core conservative. The Democrats have made big mistakes in the past too (McGovern in 1972), but have had a circular firing squad the past two elections.
As I can recall the democrats rarely let more than 2 perhaps 3 at the most candidates participate in the primaries.
Lost in all of this is any discussion of one GOP triumph – preservation of the House majority, a GOP supremacy on the state and local level. While Obama took ohio, the GOP won a super majority in the state legislature. These smaller wins create a bench for the future.
Obama has a devoted Jim Jones-like cult following. Do any of you honestly think Joe Biden would command that kind of support? Blacks would return to their traditional 12% support of Republicans, and their turnout would go down. Youth turnout would go down. And after 8 years and the public tired of the same old same old, the GOP would win.
And then once again, the talking heads would babble about how it was the Democrats who were doomed.
No, he would not
And he is such an extreme contrast to Obama personality-wise that I’m not sure many would buy voting for him is voting for the 3rd Obama term.
Plus there’s been a long prejudice against Catholic candidates. That might hurt him.
Actually, the real demographic problem the Republicans need to confront is that in the 18-29 age group, they lost 60% – 37%, and in the 30-44 age group they lost 52% – 45%. There’s usually some drift towards conservatism as you age, but that’s a matter of degree; it’s not changing basic beliefs like waking up one day and suddenly being anti-gay marriage at age 35.
You’re not going to survive as the population ages if you’re going to cling to the social policies that reflect the beliefs of the current 50+ crowd. I’m sure you’ll adapt; it’s only a matter of how soon and how gracefully.
No.. This is nothing new.
Young people start drifting Republican when they start getting jobs, paying taxes, starting families, etc.
The only thing that’s changed is young people turn out for Obama. They are usually unreliable voters.
Yes, they’ll start drifting more conservative. But it’s a drift, not an on/off switch. It’s going to be just like civil rights: it may take a generation or two, but gay marriage is going to be as uncacceptable as racisim, even within the Republican party. It will be viewed just as some Christians used the Bible and their religious believes to justify slavery, and then to justify segregation, and then to justify the prohibition of mixed race marriages: each succeding generation becoming more and more tolerant.
A man who believes taxes should be high to help the poor may well decide taxes should be lower so he can save towards retirement and the education of his children: that’s moving along a spectrum. Believing that it’s okay for gays to marry, then deciding it’s not– that’s not a spectrum, that’s a 180 degree turn. Not going to happen.
“and suddenly being anti-gay marriage at age 35. ”
You can be apatehic to it at the state level but against it at the national level…so yeah, you can wake up one day as soon as there is talk about gay marrige as a national issues and be totally against it even though you may have not voted or voted for policies that support it at the state level.
Just bad strategy. Spending hundreds of millions on tv ads at the expense of GOTV. It had nothing to do with changed demogtaphics. 13 million evangelicals and countless white males simpy did not vote.
Shortly after the Republican convention I made a modest donation to the R/R campaign. Between that time and election I must’ve been called two dozen times and e-mailed four dozen time asking for more money. NOT ONCE WAS I CALLED TO ASK IF I HAD ACTUALLY VOTED. I had, but the point is that if the effort/priority placed on fundraising had been placed on GOTV Romney would be president elect today. The campaign and RNC simply assumed the base would all show up while the Dems did not. We now will live with the result of that bad assumption for years. Pathetic!
The signal to noise on the R/R direct mail and e-mail was pretty low. Lots of spammy requests for the same thing – more donations. I got to shredding them after a while and making a filter rule to send their spam directly to the trash. Also, their fulfillment process blew. I ordered some lawn signs, magnets and bumper stickers. Nothing shipped until I harassed the campaign and the R store. Took over a month for them to send me two lawn signs, no explanation, just “we’ll ship you tomorrow” as if they were ignoring others as well, and were only shipping my stuff because i’d been a squeaky wheel. The R store is incompetent and unable to handle demand and the R campaign was a waste of time and effort, in my view. They did next to nothing to get the guy elected and just made certain people quite wealthy.
Reagan was not a inside the beltway, neocon, big spender. Reagan would identify with the Tea Party. We need to quit riding the Reagan mantle and nominate younger conservatives. You think Hillary would beat Rubio? I don’t think so, Hillary is a wore out ole name and nobody knows what will happen with Benghazi.
Romney kept saying Obama is a good man, that is not true. Obama is a bully and not a good man at all. We need to take our gloves off early and get in the gutter with them. I am backing Rubio for 2016 no matter what, Rubio! My state has a good governor, Bob McDonnell, but because he is white he may not get the nomination. Rubio baby!
Yes, Hillary would win, since more than half the country is scared to death of Republicans just on principle. Identify the reasons why and defuse them, and victory will come, even if you run a ham sandwich.
More than half the country is not “scared to death of Republicans just on principle.” An additional 385,000 votes in FL, VA, OH and CO, and Romney is the 45th President of the United States. The biggest mistake we could make, as a party, is to overreact to this loss. A more combative candidate who was willing to call Obama out on Benghazi-gate, Fast and Furious, his constant end-runs around Congress such as the “youth” DREAM Act after Congress had already voted it down, Obamacare, and many, many other issues would have done better. We’ve tried twice in a row now to nominate moderates who did not draw sharp enough distinctions between what the two parties stand for. Now, I read about how some Republicans are open to some sort of immigration amnesty, and I am very fearful for the future. Do people honestly believe that, if Republicans get behind amnesty, the 12-20 million illegal immigrants would vote in favor of Republicans? No, it would be a 75-80% vote in favor of Democrats — which is precisely why Democrats have been in favor of amnesty all along. They want to print more Democrats, and see this as the holy grail by which to do so. We should not give up our principles on taxes either, or on trying to make the federal government smaller and less all-encompassing in our lives. Nor should we believe that adopting a pro-“choice” rather than pro-life position, or softening our principles on respect for human life, will inure to our benefit with single women — all it will do is alienate and depress our base. You don’t see Democrats trying to peel votes away from our base by alienating their base, do you? If we become like the Democrats, why would anyone ever vote for us?
WTF do you live? Of course more than half the country is scared to death of Republicans on principle. Why don’t you try talking to a blue state population and extract your head from the echo chamber you are obviously in. Why do Democrats always win RV polls? They win them because people are scared of Republicans, that’s why.
Anyway, without a change in direction by the Republican Party, we can meet back here for the 2016 election loss postmortem and you can admit I was right. Bottom line is that i’m not going to plaster my car with stuff and my lawn with stuff for a party that is doing its level best to make itself uncompetitive in more and more of the country every goddamned year. It’s a lost cause and a losing proposition.
This is an example of what I’m talking about, Sean Hannity, I’ve been watching you for years, you are terribly wrong about this.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/11/hannity-ive-evolved-on-immigration-and-support-a-pathway-149078.html
How do I tell my children that they must obey the law because it’s the law, if we as a country say “if enough people break the law, we’ll just change it (rather than try our best to enforce it)”? And by the way, does that apply to our drug laws as well? We’ve spent hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars in a “war on drugs”, and last time I looked, there are lots of people still taking and selling drugs. So do we now change our laws there too? Just throw up our hands in despair?
Where was the mention of Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, all the stuff brought up by Worldnetdaily? Trying to play mister nice guy against a big Chicago bully is a losing strategy as we saw twice. The only reason McCain got so many votes in 2008 is because of Sarah Palin, she is a uniter and brings out the base, not McCain nor Romney.
Palin may have increased base turnout a bit but also would have likely produced a net loss due to independents being turned off. I still maintain R/R did not hit debt/entitlement reform anywhere near hard enough. They said during and immediately after the Republican convention that they were anxious to have the entitlement reform discussion and it was working for them for a while. It was supposedly the reason Ryan was brought onto the ticket because of his big deficit reduction and entitlement reform ideas. Then all of a sudden Romney went silent on it. I didn’t follow Ryan at his rallies so maybe he was talking about it but the top of the ticket most definitely. Scott Walker (Wisconsin Governor) said from the beginning that Romney could win Wisconsin if he went BOLD by presenting big proposals to reform government. This is what the Ryan pick was supposed to represent. A BOLD choice about the nations fiscal future. Instead Romney went small in the final weeks of the campaign giveing a rather lame 5-point plan which struck me and probably most folks as meh, so what. As a result he lost Wisconsin and just about every other state he needed to become president.
Good insight John, BHO went real dirty, why didn’t R/R? Black liberation theology, Wright, Ayers, and all the other stuff, Romney should have went after Benghazi and Fast and Furious. George W would have, Karl Rove as much as i dislike him knows how to run a campaign.
yeah yeah, I know. Mormonism is scary, but Rev. Wright isn’t! *eye roll*
Those were 2008 issues. They failed to have an impact then. They went after his record this time.
Benghazi, 4 Americans dead and a cover up? Romney FAILED big time right here. Fast and Furious, FAIL! Now we have to live under hell for 4 more years. I am sick of putting up a lackluster rich white guy that is over 60. We need fresh faces. The establishment is the problem not the Tea Party. The Tea Party is not going away and you will see more marches on Washington. I am not a tea partier but you’ll see, crap is going to hit the fan, we are in for some serious turbulence.
Does GOP have a database for the base republicans? Atleast for the battleground states ? I live in TX. When I voted electronically, I was given a code number to key in and also I had to sign my name. So, once I voted straight R, the electronic system must have captured the following data ( by the way I was a system analyst for large corporations); My name, sex, address, date-of-birth, tx driver’s licence (may be), SSN (may be), my code number and whom I voted for in 2012.
If the data is available for public, it will not be hard to come up with a database. Once we have the database, we can categorize the voters eg; strong base supporter moderate republican, leaning republican, cross over dem, etc etc.
This immigration issue is hurting us and we have not come up with some sort of compromise so here is an idea that is fair.
1. Start implementing ways to stop illegal immigration (ie, border control, penalty for hiring illegal, etc.)
2. Tell all illegals that they have to register as an undocumented resident and they will be able to stay in the country for 5 years. If, after 5 years, they have committed no felony or serious crime, paid their taxes, etc. then they can apply for citizenship. At that point, they will have to either become a citizen or will be deported. During this time they can legally get a job, buy a house, etc. but only if they have registered.
3. There has to be a penalty. Because we are a nation of laws and they came here illegally, they can still become citizens but will never be entitled to Social Security (and possibly other) benefits.
This is a fair compromise. The law-abiding, tax-paying illegals stay in the country and can become citizens if they ‘behave’ themselves but will not be able to collect SS benefits because they broke the law in coming here.
Whatever the solution is, it should involve some way to let the hard-working illegals become citizens but with some sort of waiting period and penalty. Let’s face it, a lot of these people are very hard working, have kept costs low for many businesses and simply want a better future for their children just like you or I would, If I were in Mexico, I’d be trying to cross the border too so I get where they are coming from. But there should still be some sort of penalty because we are a nation of laws (despite what liberals think).
I do not agree with letting illegal immigrants jump in line ahead of people who are playing by our rules and who have patiently been waiting for the opportunity to come to our country legally. And, as I said above, making illegal immigrants legal and giving them the right to vote is a prescription for adding 12-20 million fresh Democrats to the voting rolls. We should not delude ourselves into thinking that, just because they have been here for a while and have been “law abiding”, they will vote Republican. They will not.
I think there is a big political realignment coming.
The baby boomers are aging. They will be consuming more and more of the federal expenditures for Soc sec, medicare, etc.
Younger people will be squeezed paying higher taxes, yet their priorities (schools, infrastructure) will increasingly be short-changed. They will want to fight back. Our parties may become divided more along those issues in the coming decades rather than the current paradigms (Our current red-blue divide isn’t that old, Nixon laid the groundwork, Reagan brought the vision, and Clinton cemented the red-blue divide as it stands now)
It wasn’t just Project ORCA that failed…….I live in Rhode Island and I contacted the Romney campaign headquarters in Ohio to see if I could do some phone bank work for them. The woman on the phone seemed very knowledgeable and she directed me to a website to signup as a volunteer. She said after setting up my login information I could then login and start making calls with a script that was on the website, or select the AUTOMATED reply so that when the caller answered, by simply clicking option 1 the automated script would begin.
In reality this is what occurred. I wanted to use the AUTOMATED script option because I’m not the best talking smoothly under pressure and didn’t want to screw things up. However after attempting the AUTOMATED script about 8-10 times………it NEVER worked !!!!! I would make contact with someone, or try to leave the script on their voicemail, and EVERY single time I pressed the script button on the website, nothing happened………..DEAD AIR……..
So I gave up on that and just figured I would speak with the callers………..however in about 6-8 days I made about 150 calls…………ALL the calls were directed to Florida numbers. I figured they had some concerns in Florida because NO phone numbers were in Ohio. However of the roughly 150 calls, I only spoke with about 10 people………..at least HALF of the phone numbers were disconnect phones. I have NO IDEA where they got their database of phone numbers from but it was a tremendous waste of time for the most part and I’m thinking of how much time were other callers wasting when we could have been contacting potential
voters.
The overall impression of the phone contact online system was that it was in need of serious help, especially getting VALID phone numbers and getting the
AUTOMATED SCRIPT to actually work.