Obama and Democrats were able to frame Romney as an out of touch plutocrat. With the eager assistance of the mass media. This lead to millions of guys sitting out the election. They were never going to vote for JugEars but they took a pass on Romney too
It convinced me that the majority of the American voters are nothing more than sheeple on the national level who will do as they are told.
It was the equivalent of Lot offering his virgin daughters to the men of Sodom to protect the holy men in his household and the men of Sodom refused the offer.
I can think of at least TWO life-long Republicans who did the equivalent of "sitting out the election" not because of what the mass media did, but because of what ROMNEY did.
It's wrong to blame Romney's loss on the media. Romney lost because he was amoral, and morality is destiny. American conservatives are still a moral enough people to have rejected him even at the price of getting Obama as a consequence. Voting for Romney would have meant voting FOR homosexual outreach to children, voting FOR nationalized health care, voting FOR pro-abortion thinking, and voting FOR environmentalist tyranny. There was no such thing as voting "against."
That is why Romney lost -- on balance, Americans were too smart and too moral to vote FOR a candidate who would have acted against America's fiscal and moral interests.