We lost to a very popular incumbent, who had an almost six-month lead time of saturating battleground states with ads and speeches against Romney before he even had a chance to respond.
The Republican debate candidates were carpet bombed and criticized by Team Obama and and the MSM and had little ability to respond. Then, our guys attacked each other to get to the top of the heap, making ridiculous accusations to play “gotcha”. Again, Obama and his team are blaring their simple and direct message to voters, over and over and over while saving sound bites to use for later.
Our core message of liberty and freedom is fine, but we need to show how that benefits people other than married/white/religious. Why are our excellent minority candidates ignored? They were on prominent display at the convention and yet they seem “one and done” with respect to TV time.
Get them out front and into the streets and neighborhoods and *demonstrate* how the conservative message and ideologies can work for the average Black, Hispanic, Asian, Unmarried Woman, etc.
Popular incumbent? He was at 45 approval two months ago and that was after a year of rehabilitation. He worked his way up to 50 percent approval in the final month and half because we allowed him to redefine the economy as ‘improving’ and never challenged him effectively, outside of debates .The ads needed to go up in June. Obama was running ads with the job growth early in 2012. There is no reason we can’t have some organization challenging that with counter ads along the way. Our side has always played the game by focusing on the final few weeks. We are ceding too much ground in public opinion in the 12 previous months. We have to take our argument to the people daily. We don’t have the media, so we have to use other methods.
Frankly, we lost because not enough people in the middle class were convinced Obama policies made things worse, combined with the much bigger problem that the left has built a permanent highly targeted get out the vote machine that will be used every cycle going forward. We needed to convert more suburban middle class voters, especially women, that they are voting against their own interests with bigger fatter government. It is the only way we are not outnumbered by dependency voters.
I remember all the Freepers here who thought that Alan Keyes would win all the black vote, too.