Was Romney allowed to invest some of his own money early on in the campaign? If so, why didn’t he? Another thing - the primaries go on way too long. That gave the other side a head start on their negative ads while Romney was still running to win the nomination and then had to wait for funding and financing to come in. His ads were too milquetoast and needed to hit harder on obama. Like McCain, they played the nice guy bit - never once attacking his policies. Sure, they would have called him a racist, but they were calling him that anyway. So, he should have rolled the dice and played the game. Even if it didn’t work - at least he could have put up more of a fight.
I’m sick of these GOPE types running our campaigns. They suck at it and we do nothing but lose with their misinformation. Romney was playing for the independent votes only - his “reaching across the aisle” meme was a losing strategy just as it was with McCain. Heck, it was probably McCain who told him to use that.
The campaign shut out the conservatives at the convention, as well as Ron Paul voters. Do you think this went unnoticed? No, it didn’t. Where was Newt? Either Newt or Sarah would have been far better key note speakers than Christie - who only patted himself on the back.
I’m going to be honest - I almost didn’t go vote on election day. I felt something so wrong, but went out of hoping to defeat obama. I could have stayed home and had the same outcome.
The biggest trouble with the Primary is that New Hampshire and Iowa start it, Both voted Democrat and New Hampshire allows Crossovers, In other words we have Democrats picking our candidates.
Now I know that others can win after the New hampshire primary, but it gives the Dems poick a head start that is hard to beat.
Republicans have to refuse to participate in the New Hampshire primary.
This is the key. This is why all those working-class white voters just plain didn't show up. We had the election in the bag. It was ours to lose. They were never going to vote for Obama no matter what. We only had to come up with an acceptable candidate. And we didn't.
Many of us saw this coming in the primaries. FR helped lead the charge in fighting against a Romney nomination. Why nominate a candidate with 1%'er baggage in a season when class warfare, income inequality, Wall Street distrust and corporate bailouts had already ticked so many people off? What was so great about Romney that made it worth trying to overcome that baggage before even beginning to get our political message out?
Problem is the beltway blue bloods that run the GOP are completely tone deaf to the perspective of the common folk in flyover country. They may have believed Romney was a great candidate. But they are totally blind to the distrust most people have towards people who got super rich by pushing big money around in things like corporate buyouts or stock trades, as opposed to someone they could respect who built a successful company from the ground up, became a rich and famous star through pure talent or came up with a brilliant new invention.
The long primary wouldn't have made a difference. There was no way Romney was going to be able to "define" himself in any way that could overcome the Democrats' negative highlighting of his business career. If you were involved in numerous companies that shut down and created bitter employees to rail against you in ad after ad, that's a little too steep of a hill to climb. Besides, whatever Romney did to define himself in this campaign didn't work out too well. It wasn't the "lateness" of his effort, it was the poorness of his effort and the incredible weight he would have had to lift to make himself seem like he could relate to the common man.