Are Republicans Learning the Wrong Lessons?

As hard as it is to believe, it’s been only a little over three weeks since Election Day. But there are already plenty of signs that Republicans are learning many of the wrong lessons from that debacle. For starters, there’s been a lot of excessive emphasis on racial demographics, which actually changed very little from 2008. According to exit polling, the portion of Hispanic voters went up just 1 percentage point, the portion of Asian voters went up just 1 point, and the portion of black voters stayed the same. Meanwhile, the portion of white voters fell 2 points — largely because, as Sean Trende notes, Mitt Romney failed to turn out several million such voters.

Now Senator John McCain says that, when it comes to the life-or-death matter of abortion, Republicans should “leave the issue alone.” Well, it would be hard to have left the issue any more alone than Romney did, and what did it get him? On an issue on which Americans are typically split pretty much right down the middle, exit polling showed that voters favored the legality (59 percent), rather than illegality (36 percent), of abortion in “most” or “all” cases. This suggests that Romney’s silence in the face of Obama’s pro-abortion rhetoric caused some swing voters to shift their position leftward (as people are inclined to do when they hear only one side of an issue advanced) — while millions of pro-life voters apparently sat this one out.

In truth, the Romney strategy on essentially every issue — and especially on Obamacare — could aptly be summarized as “leave the issue alone.” Even on the economy, the one issue on which the Romney camp generally seemed eager to engage, the campaign left alone the question of how we got into this mess in the first place. Relatedly, it left alone the crucially important claim that Bill Clinton made at the Democratic convention: “Listen to me now. No president, no president — not me, not any of my predecessors — no one could have fully repaired all the damage that [Obama] found in just four years.” This, of course, was ridiculous. FDR had inherited the Great Depression, and yet, in the year that he first sought reelection, real economic growth was over 13 percent — more than six times what it’s been this year under Obama. But Romney characteristically left that one alone, and — more than three years into the Obama “recovery” — exit polling indicated that voters still blamed George W. Bush (53 percent), not Obama (38 percent), for the stagnant economy.

As a result of Romney’s failure to make the case on essentially any issue — either against Obama’s abysmal record or on behalf of his own proposals — we ended up with this very strange result: In an election pitting perhaps the most liberal president in American history against a moderate Republican who was never fully trusted by the conservative wing of his own party, likely voters polled by Pew Research less than two weeks before the election said that Obama (50 percent), not Romney (38 percent), takes the “more moderate positions.” And in an election pitting a Democratic president who rammed Obamacare through on a straight party-line vote and then spent the next two years demagoguing Republicans, versus the former Republican governor of heavily Democratic Massachusetts, likely voters in that same poll said that Obama (47 percent), not Romney (41 percent), was more “willing to work with leaders from the other party.”

As such polling suggests, Republicans didn’t lose this election because of demographics, and they didn’t lose it because of the positions they took on the issues. They lost it because they failed to make the case against Obama or on behalf of their own ideas and principles. As a result, they failed to rally independents to their side to the extent that they should have, and they failed to turn out their own base. Far from leaving key issues alone in the future, Republicans need to engage the American public on matters of importance and make their case in persuasive language.

More than anything, the debacle of 2012 should show the GOP that it can’t run a Seinfeldian campaign — a campaign about nothing. Chris Caldwell summed it up nicely in these pages: “Where two candidates argue over values, the public may prefer one to the other. But where only one candidate has values, he wins, whatever those values happen to be.”

Intriguingly Romney got about the same number of votes as McCain, but both fell several million below "W"'s second run.

Obama fell several million votes below what he'd had in 2008.

The way I see it is candidate quality was the problem. Romney was no more a draw than was McCain. Obama ran as 'first negro' ~ and he set records, then he ran is 'jus' another chicago street thug' and did less well ~ a lesson to the Dems!

The problem for us is the GOP-e ~ and some major donors who imagine you really can buy an election by buying advertising on the last couple of days.

You have to build your support in the years between elections so you have people willing to turn out for your candidates. Running loser after loser dispirits people, and then they don't vote.

I don’t see why we have to remain tied to the GOP. Saying that we have to be is simply simpleminded and a lack of imagination. The GOP can go away, and we’ll be none the worse for it. Better to build something else using conservative GOPers, conservative independents, while picking off some Democrats who lean to the Right but haven’t given up their Party yet because the GOP doesn;t really offer a better alternative.

If you're going to go this way, I humbly suggest you look over the current minor parties that offer a conservative alternative (eg., Constitution Party) and find out why they failed to click with millions. Once you find out what's stopping them, you'll know what traps to avoid - and when to call it a day if those traps prove to be unavoidable.

If you have Ross Perot in the back of your mind, please keep in mind that he's a supersalesman. He started up EDS because, as an IBM salesman, he met his full-year quota in a few weeks! And as a result, he was told to take it easy for the rest of the year by IBM management. Declining, he started up EDS and made a mint selling computer time-share services.

Here's the point. Ross Perot did not invent the computer. He did not invent time-sharing. Instead, he brilliantly marketed the two. That's his strength: marketing and selling a product that's already been put in place for him to sell. He managed to see ways that computers and time-sharing could make his customers more productive, and he ginned himself up to believe in his solutions passionately. That's what good salespeople do.

When he ran in '92, he needed a platform. He needed a platform that he could sell the h*** out of. As a natural marketer, he figured out quickly that the best "product" would aim at the centre. It would have to be one that appealed to both Republicans and Democrats. It would have to be a platform that would be eagerly welcomed by disgruntled conservative and disgruntled moderates and liberals. He needed all three as a "prospect base" in order to maximize his campaign's appeal.

And, of course, he needed a single theme to knit his program together. A single concept is much easier to sell than a bullet-point list.

So, his platform had to have:

A single theme;
A natural appeal to liberals and moderates as well as conservatives;
A ready-to-wear package as the true centre;
And, it had to make mainstream liberals and mainstream conservatives look "extreme" as well as "obstructionist."

Thus, he settled upon populist protectionism: that "giant sucking sound" of his infomercial. Carefully crafted, by a genuine supersalesman, to make both liberals and conservatives look bad.

Perot aimed at the centre. He aimed at the centre because that's where the most prospects were. That's why, before his meltdown, he was a serious contender. He aimed at the centre with a very enticing populist twist, which made both established parties look ineffectual as well as "ideological." He eschewed any policy that could be credibly tarred as "extreme" by his opponents.

So...if your third party idea is going to get off the ground, you'll all but have to aim at the centre. You have to make a home for disgruntled liberals and moderates as well as conservatives. You need a single policy, like Perot's protectionism, that ticks off both Democrat insiders and Republican insiders. One that gets splutters out of establishment conservatives as well as establishment liberals, like Ross Perot's protectionism did. That way, you can position yourself as offering a middle way between the two extremes. As an anti-ideologue battling two parties full of ideologues. As someone who can cut through the liberal nonsense and the conservative nonsense. Unless you have both, you've cut yourself off from most of your prospects and are likely to fall into the "splinter party" or "too extreme for the extremists" trap.

And...in order to reach that goal, you have to eschew any policy that would scare off disgruntled moderates and disgruntled liberals. You have to get to them all, as did Perot in his heyday.

As I hope I've indicated, it's a tall order - and likely requires a supersalesperson to see it through.

You apparently got your data from this Fox News Exit Poll:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2012-exit-poll

This is why Romney lost.

It looks like part of the problem, but there are other responses in that poll that are much more encouraging for future Republican candidates. For example:

Which ONE of these four candidate qualities mattered most
in deciding how you voted for president?(CHECK ONLY ONE)
Candidate quality: Total__Obama__Romney
Shares my values: 27%__42%__55%
Is a strong leader: 18%__38%__61%
Cares about people like me: 21%__81%__18%
Has a vision for the future: 29%__45%__54%

Romney won three of the four groups, but he lost the "Cares about people like me" group by a huge margin, 18% to 81%. I interpret that as a reaction primarily to Romney's wealth, but the 47% comments are probably also part of that result. A future non-wealthy Republican candidate should be able to change those numbers.

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