It did?
Posted on 11/09/2012 4:02:56 PM PST by Kaslin
Mitt Romney's top campaign aides conducted a conference call with conservative journalists this afternoon, during which they assessed the damage from Tuesday's electoral loss. The participants included campaign manager Matt Rhoades, political director Rich Beeson, polling director Neil Newhouse and digital director Zac Moffatt. A few notes from the call:
Matt Rhoades, on the overall race: "No campaign is perfect, and we certainly made our share of mistakes." On Paul Ryan: "He has come away from this race with a very bright future before him."
Rich Beeson, on the campaign's strategy: "We won independents and held the base. We thought that would be a winning combination." Given the heavily Democratic electorate, it was not. On Boston's computerized 'ORCA' ground game tracking system: "This was the first time we'd ever done anything like [ORCA] on that grand a scale. We got data from 91% of precincts across the country," he said, noting that the program will help Republicans track and predict voting behavior in the future. As for reports that the system crashed on election day, Beeson conceded that there were significant technical issues: "There were glitches in the system, I don't want to gloss over that. We were able to beta test it, but not at the volume of data we needed." He said the program thought it had been hacked, which triggered a laborious process of rebooting the whole system with new passwords.
Neil Newhouse, on the outcome: "It didn't end up like we'd hoped for and expected (more on the "expected" part later). [The Obama campaign] ran a very small campaign in a very big way." Newhouse said the opposition effectively targeted specific demos in their coalition, using contraceptives, DREAM Act waivers, and student loan policies to entice key elements of their base to show up and vote. They "pretty damn well succeeded" at turning out their voters, he concluded. As an example, Newhouse pointed out that in Ohio, 160,000 more African Americans voted in 2012 than in 2008. Obama's margin of victory in the state was roughly 100,000. On the other hand, "we had fewer white voters turn out [nationwide] in this election than in 2008. The question we have to ask ourselves is 'how did that happen?'"
Newhouse, on Romney's strengths: In exit polling, voters were asked about four metrics of leadership. Romney beat Obama on the questions of (a) which candidate has a positive vision for the country, (b) which candidate shares "my values," and (c) which candidate is a "strong leader." Despite batting .750, Romney got crushed by approximately 60 points on the question of which candidate "cares about people like me." This suggests that the Obama campaign's early "kill Romney" approach -- painting the former governor and CEO as an out-of-touch, uber-wealthy, outsourcing robber barron -- worked. It also suggests that personal connection and relatability are now more important factors in national elections than experience or accomplishment. Newhouse added that the right track/wrong track statistics tightened by 48 net points from November of 2011 through election day, which helped boost the president's approval rating to non-fatal levels.
Newhouse, on the effects of Hurricane Sandy: "It was not determinative. It was a factor, it was not the factor. But it hit the pause button on our campaign and our messaging for about four or five days, and it gave Obama the opportunity to look presidential." Newhouse said exit polling indicated that about three percent of the electorate said Sandy was the most important factor (!) in their presidential choice, and that many of them made up minds in the last few days of the campaign.
Question and answer period:
The Washington Examiner's Michael Barone asked whether the birth control attacks were effective. The campaign brain trust said that HHS' contraception move was narrowly targeted at a segment of the population -- young unmarried women, whom Obama carried by 38 points on Tuesday. Romney's advisers said Team Obama knew exactly what they were doing by running the unseemly "first time" ad; they recognized they'd face blowback from some elements of the population, but thought it was worth it on balance, in order to appeal to young women.
PJTV's Roger Simon asked about Romney's bruising loss among Hispanic voters. The entire Romney team acknowledged that this was a big problem, and that Republicans need to think hard about how to reverse this trend. Part of the issue, Beeson said, was that Obama's campaign spent heavily on brutally negative ads against Romney for many months over the late spring and summer, before Romney had the resources to fight back. "By that time, [Hispanic voters] were already predisposed against us," he said. Romney's advisers also mentioned that the attack ads Obama ran on Spanish language radio and television were far "meaner, tougher and over-the-top" than "any attacks they leveled against us in English." This battle played out intensely, but off the mainstream media's radar.
I asked about the October "expand the map" strategy, which demonstrably failed. Was the campaign engaging in a deliberate head-fake by pretending that Pennsylvania, Minnesota and other states were in play -- or did they actually believe they had their core path locked up (through Virginia, Florida, Colorado, etc), and thus had the luxury of expansion? I also wondered aloud which scenario would be worse (misdirection vs. bad intel). The Romney brain trust seemed to side-step the heart of my inquiry, instead focusing on the Pennsylvania aspect. Newhouse: "The decision was not made lightly to expand the map. In order for us to go into PA, we had to have every other friggen' thing in the campaign fully funded. We went to everyone to make sure they were fully funded before we went into Pennsylvania. Every other need was met before we did that. The guys on the ground in PA, including our polling guys, were very encouraging. Our numbers were positive there. As it turns out, it was relatively close, but it wasn't as close as other target states." Beeson: "The Obama campaign saw the same numbers we did. They clearly saw it closing. We wanted to wait as long as we could to prevent them from getting that Philadelphia machine fired up in time."
These analyses make sense, but only within the context of the campaign truly believing that they were safe in other crucial must-have states -- a cataclysmically wrong assumption. When I stopped by Romney headquarters in Boston back in September, Newhouse said his team was anticipating a D+3 electorate in November. This seemed entirely reasonable to me, based on evidence from 2004, 2008 and 2010, but it turned out to be incorrect. The actual electorate this year was D+6. Post-election news reports reveal that Mitt Romney was "shell-shocked" by his loss, an outcome that can only be explained by shockingly flawed internal polling. Was that polling predicated on a D+3 model? If so, that would explain the huge disconnect between Boston's expectations and the final results. I'll reiterate that although the D+3 model seemed sensible on its face, it was the campaign pollsters' job to figure out if their assumptions comported with reality. In retrospect, their failure to do so looms very, very large.
Finally, Joel Pollak from Breitbart asked if the campaign's gurus felt like they'd let down the American people, particularly Romney's supporters. The takeaway line from a relatively broad answer to this (admittedly tough) question came from Neil Newhouse: "There's a sense that we let Mitt Romney down." If the candidate truly expected to be delivering a victory speech on Tuesday night, even as he was in the process of losing the popular vote by two percentage points and the electoral college by a wider margin, Newhouse's assertion isn't too far off.
UPDATE - Here is Jen Rubin's WaPo write-up of the same call.
It's simple. He's the "Anointed one" that was going to save America. It was his destiny.
Oops, someone else must have been anointed. I'm sure there will be some revelation to that extent over the next 2 or 3 years.
Harry Reid perhaps?
It's not an excuse. It's just reality. Presidential elections, at least since suffrage, have always been won more on a candidate's personality and likability than on issues. We do have to be strategic in selecting our nominees so that they pass that test. Romney never did and it was understood and stated by many observers during the primary.
Absolutely, the ignorant electorate is a problem and they deserve blame for that. But that's a problem we should all be well aware of and strategize around if we want to win. So we deserve blame for not doing that.
Also, this is not so much about Romney being rich, but about his out-of-touch personality and him not having a compelling life story for how he made his riches that people could relate to. Trump might have had other problems as a candidate, but he is a rich guy that people could relate to on the drinking buddy level. Romney is just the Republican version of John Kerry.
Obviously his greatest improvement was in the first debate. His likability improved because of respect and admiration for his ability, if not necessarily for relatability. But this election was too important to pick a candidate who still had his campaign training wheels on. I still think Newt Gingrich would have pulled this off. He would have had no problem relating to the common, blue collar white guys that stayed home. They would've believed that he was on their side. And he wouldn't have held anything back when criticizing Obama.
We not only let Romney down, we let America down!
Here’s how you do it:
A committee decides on the three candidates that will run (Bring back the smoke-filled rooms!) More than three is counter-productive.
The first Primary is in Texas.....the one who finishes last, drops out.
Yeah it was them awful bigotted Mormons...
From the Mormon owned newspaper the Deseret News out of Salt Lake City, Utah...
Friday, Nov. 9 2012 11:20 a.m. MST
Pew analysis: Mitt Romney pulls in fewer Mormon votes than Bush
Summary According to a new Pew analysis, Republican Mitt Romney received a slightly smaller percentage of the Mormon vote than George W. Bush did in 2004, although Romney did see more of the Jewish vote than any recent GOP candidate.
Our take: According to a new Pew analysis, Republican Mitt Romney received a slightly smaller percentage of the Mormon vote than George W. Bush did in 2004, although Romney did see more of the Jewish vote than any recent GOP candidate.
“Some 80 percent of Mormons voted for Bush, while 78 percent voted for Romney, who is Mormon,” U.S. News reported. “That’s not to say Mormons weren’t in Romney’s corner this election. Pew points out that 78 percent means nearly 8 in 10 Mormons voted for Romney, while only 2 in 10 voted for Obama.”
According to Pew, exit polling data for Mormons was not available in 2000 and 2008.
“It appears that Bush simply received more of the religious vote overall, garnering more of the Catholic and Protestant vote than Romney as well,” the U.S. News report said. “Romney, however, received more of the Jewish vote than Bush or any recent GOP candidate, with 30 percent of Jewish voters casting ballots for Romney. Sixty-nine percent voted for Obama, a nine percentage point drop from 2008.”
Religiously unaffiliated voters were firmly in Obama’s corner in 2012, Pew said, coming in at 70 percent. More than six in ten voters who say they never attend religious services voted for Obama, while those who said they attended religious services a few times a month or year went for Obama over Romney by a 55 percent to 43 percent margin.
FCOL these people are stupidass numbnutz! Rino, rino, rino, rino, LOSERS, LOSERS, LOSERS!!!! The FACTUAL picture was right in front of your faces! The empirical data was overwhelming evident!
I guarantee the republican party will do the exact same thing next election. There is no way around it, the GOPe are just plain idiots.
We were able to beta test it,
________________________________________
Tonight on Roger Hedgecock, Ben Shapiro said it was NEVER beta tested...
Atticus you didn’t get the memo —”Nobody wins by going negative”...LOL, what a joke the rules we hamper ourselves with. These experts and pundits aren’t worth the cost of their coffee consumption.
He thought he was the prophecized ‘One Mighty and Strong’
thats one reason hes so mentally broken right now...
That is true of independents, but Romney's problem was not with independents. It was with Republicans. That tells me that your supposition is intrinsically wrong with regard to Romney.
He had the votes!
________________________________
good for him...
but he needed them in the ballot box...
Get used to the fact that unless and until the spineless, brainless, unprincipled elitists who have absolute contempt for GOP rank and file views on social issues, military issues, foreign policy issues and for people of modest means, have the door slammed in their smug $$$ faces permanently when it comes to GOP nominations for POTUS, US Senate and other offices, the GOP is headed for the same fate as its $$$$$ obsessed predecessors of the Federalist and Whig parties.
If "the rich guy" cannot demonstrate the slightest shred of evidence that he has a clue about anything but the care and feeding of Muffy's trust fund, why should ANYONE vote for him????? Except, of course, for Muffy?
Politics is a contact sport. The polo players and the Junior Leaguers and their ilk will stop at nothing to try and keep control of the GOP (their ancestral party which they feel entitled by birth to control forever since great great grandpa Ebenezer fought for Abe Lincoln in the Civil War before making the family fortune by founding Amalgamated Veeblefritzer). They express knee jerk embarrassment over any Republican who is credibly pro-life, pro-family, anti-fudgepacking posing as "marriage," pro-gun, pro-military, aggressively oriented in foreign policy, etc. They hide their feminazi female relatives in the attic lest we catch on to the social issue revolutionary attitude that is wall to wall in their rarified snobby social set. They essentially agree with Obama on everything but their own tax rates. And WE are supposed to be foot soldiers in their endless quest for nothing better than favorable tax treatment of the spoiled and wealthy????
No sale. Now or ever. This year is the first time in any POTUS election since 1968 that I have EVER failed to vote GOP. If they keep on nominating the likes of McCain, Bush the Elder, Dole, Romney and their establishmentarian imbeciles, I won't vote for any more of them either. If you are motivated by your tax rates, tooo baaaaaad! Pay more until you are prepared to honor the ENTIRE GOP agenda. 55+ million dead babies, sliced, diced and hamburgerized while the GOP-E yawns is more than enough. If the GOP does not create a wall-to-wall Senate firewall to prevent Obozo from getting ANY more SCOTUS nominees ratified, then it is time for a third party of populist economic views and absolutely rigid conservatism on everything else (i.e. everything that really matters).
An actual conservative voting for the likes of Romney is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.
And you have the gilt-edged nerve to attack those conservatives who could not stomach your crumby excuse for a candidate: "traitorous Obama-voters-by-default???????" How about a political party can only EARN the loyalty of its voters by saying (in the platform) what it MEANS and MEANING (in candidate performance) what it says. No more mere lip service. Comply or suffer as a party. If your party is nothing better than a pale pastel copy of Obozo's political party (Myth is like Obozo only an infinitesimal smidgeon to his right---sometimes), needn't expect much loyalty from the rank and file. You want treason??? If you were enthusiastic for his Smug Elitist Brainlessness, look in the mirror!
Dittos, my friend!
You expressed perfectly what a growing number of us feel. I didn’t stay home. I voted against both liberals.
It did?
heres a comment to the Mormon owned newspaper, Deseret news from a lady in Atlanta GA...
“My husband was in Vietnam FIGHTING for his country while Romney was in Paris serving his mission. By his own words he lived in a “palatial” home for his entire mission. My husband was slogging it out in a country where you couldn’t tell the ARVN from the enemy. Children carried assault weapons. Soldiers are still fighting nightmares and PTSD from that horrific war.
So what does Romney do after returning from his mission. He joins coaltions in favor of this “righteous” (once again his words) war!
The American public including me TRIED to understand his “plans” for turning the country around. He REFUSED to give specifics! He would change his position so often that I didn’t know if he just lacked character or was trying to appease whatever audience he was in front of!
We NEVER knew what was in his heart. It was like nailing (green) jello to a tree....”
(Deseret news, ‘A day of painful goodbyes for Mitt Romney’ Nov 7, 2012)
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