What encourages me is the 43% of Americans who choose not to vote.
You are right, this is a vast pool of potential customers for our product. I agree with you, our product is individual liberty but I do not believe it was among the choices which the customers consciously considered in the last election. In my view Obama succeeded in shaping the issues, as Newt pointed out in his speech, the issue became Sandra Fluke and more recently became Grover Norquist. It is clear that it no time in this campaign did we drive the debate. My instinct is (only instinct, not knowledge) that in politics if you are on defense you are losing.
That suggests (but only suggests) that there is an entire breakdown in message identification as well as message delivery. It seems to me that there should be a handbook on the timing, nature, target, and expected effectiveness of, for example, radio advertising to Hispanic groups. I would expect, (but only expect, not presume) that we will find that there is a interesting curve of effectiveness which tells us that early messages are more dollar productive than later messages. I suspect we will find that the dollar cost per vote is on a similar curve.
But all this presumes that there is a dedication to fact-finding in which all methods of message selection, delivery and persuasion is tested against other methods and we have some hard data upon which to proceed. In other words when is it effective to spend money on radio advertising, television advertising, cyber war, boots on the ground get out the vote? The subset of questions which popped to mind merely considering such a list is long and and only leads to more questions.
But I do not understand how we can conclude that we have bad messenger or a bad message until we know where we screwed up. Until we know that it was our ground game, or that it was our belated response to the negative ads characterizing Romney, or was the failure to pursue Benghazi, or was the failure to articulate the coming financial disaster, or that it was the muzzling of Paul Ryan, that caused the apparent problem, i.e., the inability to get white Republicans to the polls. How can we conclude that it was Romney's Mormonism, as one poster on this thread has asserted? How can we say that it was conservatives staying home because of Romney's history in Massachusetts if we do not know what the electorate knew? We can pontificate all day long and feel self-righteous about our conservative bona fides that it "t'was Rinos that killed the beast" or we can actually find out what happened.
One of the most dangerous courses in war, business, or politics is to engage in assumptions. What appears to be "common sense" to me as a well-educated, white, suburbanite, upper-middle-class, professional is not necessarily obvious to single women who have felt betrayed by one man after another. They do not think the way I do. We have very very little in common. All I have to do to prove this to myself is to take a look at the magazines directed to women in a doctor's waiting room. We laughed at Sandra fluke, we thought her demands were ludicrous and would backfire on Democrats. Who had the last laugh?
What we do not know is killing us. What we think we know is killing us faster.
If we continue self righteous but ignorant, we will never crest the demographic tsunami which is breaking upon us.
