There is a very good reason for that. We lost this election largely because we assumed our own ideology. In other words, we could not believe that the electorate would be stupid enough to reelect a man who was destroying the country. We were not alone. Gingrich flatly states that he was astonished by the results and plans to take six months to find out what happened. Michael Barone, a man whom all of us must respect as one of the great political scientists who calls 'em as he sees 'em, got the election results in the electoral college wrong by scores of votes. The vaunted Karl Rove was humiliated on national television the night of the election when he could not believe the results in Ohio. I got it wrong, you got it wrong, we all got it wrong.
And we got it wrong mostly because we were blinded by our own ideology. We just could not believe the country could be so damn stupid.
But there was one guy who got it right, David Axelrod. You can see his analysis of the election, or at least as much is he will give away, on C-SPAN right here:
http://www.c-span.org/Events/Obama-Adviser-David-Axelrod-on-His-Career-in-Journalism-Politics/10737436338-1/
What does David Axelrod, the man who actually won the election, have to say? He talks about getting the right data. He talks about correctly analyzing the data. He talks about having intelligent people analyzing the data. He remarks on the dichotomy between what the public polls were telling people like us and, no doubt, the Romney campaign and what Axelrod's truly extensive polling and really intensive focus group research were telling him. It is clear that everybody on our side got it wrong and it was not because of voter fraud-although that might have played a small part in isolated incidents-it was because we did not read the electorate correctly. There is a word for this, we were purblind.
One example, Axelrod knew the swing voters were blaming the economy on Bush and excusing Obama. We had public polling that was even telling us that, but we did not accept the implications of it because we could not accept the reality of it. In this context, Romney's whole campaign on the economy missed the Mark.
Gingrich as outlined innumerable propositions and 25 questions and it is only after these propositions and questions are addressed that we should turn to ideology. If we do it in reverse order we will simply deceive ourselves one more time. The Rinos will sing their old song and we will make our old complaints. The Rinos will say "we delivered you the independents" and the conservatives will say, "where is the base?" Each side will indict the other, each will claim that the others ideological stubbornness, or ideological fecklessness, is bringing us electoral ruin. Neither side will have good hard data upon which to make its case. We will never know.
Ignorant but impassioned, we will be doomed to repeat.
To return to Axelrod, he talks about the need to be informed by the data and, having assessed what is attractive, having identified the vocabulary that works, at that point the strategist applies the data to the service of ideology. If you are sick and tired of having David Brooks tell you how to win elections and having the Republican establishment inside the Beltway listen to him, arm yourself with the data to refute him.
Last night, Christmas Eve, I posted this reply, to "The story behind Mitt Romney’s loss in the presidential campaign to President Obama."
(http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/pings):
It is important for conservatives to understand the import of this article. It says that Romney did not lose the election for ideological reasons but for mechanical failures. Many FReepers no doubt will find this frustrating.(emphasis supplied)
I have been saying since the night of the election loss that we must withhold our judgment about why the campaign went the way it did until we have data. The primary question remains, why did so few white voters bother go to the polls?
I think this article tells us a lot about why black and Hispanic voters went to the polls. It suggests that white voters did not go to the polls because Romney's rope a dope strategy permitted Obama to demonize Romney and the election was then and there lost. That seems plausible to me but what do I know? No more and no less than any other FREEPER with an ideological ax to grind on these threads. In the absence of data which tells us why our voters stayed home, we are just setting ourselves up for another fiasco by engaging in political onanism.
To the degree that we choose to believe it, the article tells some things that are obvious and some things that were not obvious to us at the time. For example, it was obvious to us that unanswered attack ads are poison especially for a candidate who is not already established in the minds of the electorate. I remember posting that it was far more expensive to try to unconvince people who have been convinced against you and then convince them on your behalf than it is simply to convince them in the first place. By not engaging Obama early on, Romney put himself in the position of arguing against the voter' s judgment for making a wrong assessment. That is almost an impossible sale. Without data, I can only say this is my opinion, but it seems to me obvious that the spending on television ads in the future will go on in the beginning rather more than at the end. As the Democrat said, he never saw an effective ad after Labor Day.
It was not obvious at the time that Obama had taken his ground game to a new level, that his level of technological innovation was light years ahead of Romney, that Romney's cyber war capability would be a fiasco, that Romney, who could have had access to the best polling and bogus group data ever, would permit himself to be misled. Apart from what that says about Romney and his vaunted ability as a manager, it tells us that no political campaign should be conducted when it is dependent on only one source of intelligence. No competent general would do it and no candidate should do it. In the future, a prudent candidate will engage a competing polling service to play the devil's advocate to his campaign manager' s polling service and require both sides to litigate in an adversarial setting the meaning of their data.
My conclusion from all of this is that the campaign for the 2016 election began on November 7, 2012, at least it has on the Democrat side, but one wonders what, if anything, is happening on the Republican side. Republicans seem to have decided to form a committee to tell them what happened to them. If Rino consultants form the committee I suspect Romney's Rino consultants will have little to fear from the report. I would much prefer them to consult pollsters of the style of Michael Barone to find out what happened precinct by precinct. But even Barone, as competent as he is, got it terribly wrong. So, I want dueling analyses of the postmortem just as I would in an ongoing campaign.
Since the campaign is already begun, Republicans should pay the price of attacking Obama beginning now and everyday for the rest of his term. Obama successfully ran against George Bush who was not on the ticket in 2008 and he was able to do it again in 2012, let a Republican do the same in 2016. But that can only be done if the predicate is laid. The predicate is an unremitting, unrelenting attack on Obama until the façade is finally eroded. All of this, so far, has nothing to do with ideology. It does not say a word about whether Romney ran his campaign too far to the left or too far to the right. (emphasis supplied)
This article and the data which has surfaced so far do not tell us what position we should adopt on immigration, whether we have to pander to Hispanics, or whether we should cling to the base. We simply do not know. It is no more proper for we conservatives to pontificate our doctrine than it is for Rinos to counsel cowardice. On the other hand, we can draw some conclusions about the mechanics. (emphasis supplied)
We get ever closer to some understanding but we are not there yet. If this article is correct and we manage to draw the right conclusions from it, we will know that we failed mechanically. But will we know whether the right mechanics would have won given the ideological position Romney advanced? Was it lost due to his reputation as a Rino or was it due to his failure to exploit Benghazi and Obama's ability to exploit hurricane Sandy? Would Romney have lost worse if he had campaigned farther to the right?
I do not want that to be the case, I want it to be that the more conservative the candidate, the better the candidate's chances, but I want to know what is real not what makes me feel good.
Merry Christmas.
