You are correct. Romney gave us the best chance to win, and he came close. Did a lot of things right (e.g. Ryan), did some things wrong (e.g., not enough specifics on his five-point plan). Overall, ran a fairly decent campaign, could have been stronger, coasted too much toward the end.
No, Romney did not give us the best chance to win.
If you get off the conservative boards and start looking around other places (like the comments on newspaper stories), you’ll see a lot of comments like”
“I didn’t think there was that much difference between Obama and Romney, so I just stayed with what I knew and voted Obama.”
That may seem shocking to us here, but consider the typical swing voter. They don’t spend much time gathering information on candidates, their understanding of issues is shallow, they get most of their information from TV commercials, and they make up their mind in the last couple of months.
Romney’s pitch to these voters was “Obama’s doing a bad job, I’ll do better.” Never really explaining why he would do better; he just trusted swing voters to believe he would do better. Meanwhile, Obama painted Romney as a guy that might screw things up again.
Swing voters ended up voting for the devil they knew, instead of taking a risk on the devil they didn’t know. By not explaining why swing voters should vote FOR him (instead of just against Obama) Romney doomed his campaign.
Had we run Newt Gingrich, we wouldn’t have done any worse, but because Gingrich could explain why swing voters should vote FOR him, there would have been a chance to win.
Reagan’s greatest asset was his ability to explain conservative principles so that everyone understood them, and understood how they and the country would benefit from them. That’s the candidate we need to find (and coalesce around) next time. Holding all the right positions isn’t enough, we need someone that can communicate those positions.
The only two GOP candidates in that last election that fit that description would have been Cain or Gingrich. Looking back, we should probably have backed Gingrich.
He coasted up until the 90 minutes during the first debate and immediately began coasting afterwards for the remainder of the campaign. Did he even do any national media interviews during that last month with conservative or mainstream media outlets? The next candidate might want to try and get their face out there on some free airtime if they're trying to get elected president.
How so by being Obama Lite? We conservatives have held our nose twice and voted for a RINO who lost to a lightweight. There ain't gonna be a third time for me.