1. Obama’s popular vote total ended up tracking his RCP job approval average very closely. That’s why I always thought it would be tough for Romney to win as long as Obama’s job approval was between 49%-50%.
2. I blew the call on Scott Brown. The Obama tide in Massachusetts was just too much. This was one election where no Republican ever born could win statewide office in this state.
3. My counterintuitive suggestion is that the Republicans would have been better off if the center-right and launched a sustained and vivid attack on Obama’s abortion extremism (especially on partial birth abortion.) Ceding the social issues field to Obama let him get away with his own extremism and let him be aggressive on this issue. Whose idea was it to think that going to bat on the contraception mandate as a policy focus was more important than partial birth abortion? The focus on late term abortion not only would have (subtly) changed many people’s views of Obama, it might have made some converts to the pro-life cause. This burden probably shouldn’t have been taken up by the Romney campaign. I’m think some 90 second to two minute ads run by one of the outside groups focusing on the humanity of the late term fetus and Obama’s record. It would have done more good than the tens of millions spent on redundant ads reminding the electorate of what they knew about the lousy economy. The election is over, but it still isn’t too late to start making the case.
4. I often focus on the need for longer ads to get center-right messages across. There is a reason for that. There is no exaggerating how little the center-right communicates to the vast majority of people under age thirty. The media transmission belt for conservative ideas is broken when it comes to the majority of the country and especially the young. They literally hear very little of what we have to say and much of what they do hear sounds like total nonsense. A thirty second as is just too short to make an argument to someone who isn’t already plugged into your narratives. All you are likely to get across is get a bunch of slogans and atmospherics that don’t even mean much to your intended audience. There need to arguments pitched to people who don’t already agree with the prevailing conservative narratives.
Bridging this communications gap is too much to ask from elected politicians and definitely too much to ask from politicians in an election year. The messaging burden will need to be handled (IF it is ever handled) by outside groups and maybe some organizing work from the Republican National Committee. Most of the work will need to be done in nonelection years. Persuasion is going to be slow (though the results might be stochastic.) Nobody should expect millions of conversions in a week or a month or a year. Just figuring out a common political language will take time. Even if conservatives get everything right (don’t bet on it) integrating the center-right message into the narratives of nonconservatives will take time. People who took their kids with them so the kids could see them voting for Obama, or who only know conservatives through the Daily Show won’t change their minds all at once. But people do change their minds. Part of it will involve nonconservatives (who aren’t necessarily ideological liberals) hearing something real, intelligible and relevant from conservatives. Perceptions do shift and people become open to new alternatives without even knowing it is happening. Then conservatives will have to take advantage of circumstances as they come up. Only then is there a reasonable hope of changing a substantial number of minds. The problem is that the work of putting people in mind to give conservative candidates a shot in election years is going to be expensive, time consuming and thankless for years to come. There are a lot of emotional incentives to avoid this work.
November 7th, 2012 | 9:27 pm
1. Unfortunately, I just don’t see it. Recall that in 2008 Obama just lied about his abortion position & record, and the MSM covered for him. This time around they would have done the same thing AND accused the GOP of rehashing old news AND folded it into their absurd WoW nonsense, which clearly worked quite well for their target demo.
2. How about folks like Paul Ryan, Bobby Jindal, etc., do a series of town-halls and other sorts of events at campuses across the country? Year round, every year, all the time.
November 7th, 2012 | 9:52 pm
1. Brian, let him lie. It is a free country. Of course the MSM covered from Obama on this issue. Abortion is one of those issues where the liberal-leaning-but-not explicitly-partisan media doesn’t even try to be sort of fair. So what? That most people don’t know the extent of Obama’s abortion extremism is the fault of the center-right. If the center-right invests in a issue, the median voter will at least hear about it. This is especially true if there is an ad campaign. Huge numbers of people don’t know what partial birth abortion is never mind that Obama was for keeping it legal.
2. My concern is that the impact of such things will be limited and all of these people have real jobs. I just don’t think that we should expect too much from elected officials (not too little either.) A lot of the weight will have to be carried by conservative organizations. There is a lot of money out there being wasted on ads that make the rubble bounce in election years and say nothing to the constituencies the center-right needs to win over.
November 8th, 2012 | 7:47 am
Spot-on, Pete. Especially on 3 and 4.
Brian’s town-hall idea has more merit than you think.
As for the lovely Ms. Warren, recall my certainty that the cook-book plagiarism (never, as far as I know, denied or refuted) was the final sign that she was DONE: http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2012/05/19/elizabeth-warren-the-low-down-democratic-goodness-of-public-shaming/
November 8th, 2012 | 2:07 pm
After signing the Economists for Romney statement in mid August I received an email from a student who was with the College Republicans. I replied and the content of my email is pasted below. It relates to your points 3 and 4. In his response to my reply the student wrote “I believe many college students are either unaware of, or don’t have a great perspective on many of the issues you mention.” This is not the first time I’ve had such a response from a student.
The text of my email:
I received the Economists for Romney petition and added my name because I had decided to vote for Romney and thought for what it was worth I would add my name to the petition as a way of supporting his candidacy. I do think of Romney and Ryan as pragmatic problem solvers whom I think will be more likely to come to grips, than would a second Obama administration, with the long term implications of the enormous structural deficit, a problem Obama intensified by pushing through, without sufficient bipartisan support, an inadequately understood health care plan. But my opposition to the reelection of Obama, whom I did not vote for last time around, is based primarily on issues other than economic issues, and my willingness to sign the statement was based more on these other factors than the specific economic content of the statement. Although since I did think the economic content deserved serious consideration in the upcoming election I decided I would sign it. For these reasons I’m prepared to be part of a panel that explained and defended the case for Romney and Ryan on the basis of economic policy. I’d have to spend more time preparing than I will have available both now and once classes begin. In light of this, perhaps I should not have signed the statement before I had thoroughly convinced myself that I fully supported all elements of the statement.
My support for Romney is based primarily in my opposition to Obama’s presidency and that opposition is based in the first instance, on my strong interest in the pro life issue, and the fact that Obama when he was a candidate last time around (and nothing has changed for the better in this regard in my view) was completely unacceptable from my pro life perspective. If you are interested in this perspective of mine i can explain my view in more detail. I also think it is important to support natural marriage in our law and public policy, and the fact that the Obama Justice Department would not defend challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act (passed with strong bipartisan support in both Houses of Congress and signed into law by President Clinton) on the basis of the reasons Congress had for enacting the law, has reinforced my opposition to Obama. And in the run up to the enactment of the Affordable Care Act the Obama administration persistently took the position of groups such as NARAL causing life long Democrats like me to conclude that the Democratic party had no place for us. I can add to this the current Obama confrontation with First amendment religious liberty rights that is implicit in the HHS mandate on the provision of contraceptives and abortifacients. I have also been particularly concerned about what I regard as the antidemocratic nature of the Independent Payments Advisory Board set up under the Obama health plan as the ultimate way to control health costs. I do not know how much thought you’ve given to this Board, but I believe its structure and operations are contrary to the principles of democratic governance. The decisions of this Board are it seems to me beyond effective democratic control.
November 9th, 2012 | 6:25 pm
Carl, nothing against Brian’s idea. Paul Ryan does a lot of that. I wish the GOP had a hundred more Paul Ryans doing the same thing. It’s just that their day jobs would tend to limit their impact during nonelection years (when most of the attitude-shifting should be focused on) and a lot of people we need aren’t going to be going to those meetings.
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