Since Peter Lawler asked, but the conclusions are sobering.
1. Of all the candidates who ran for the Republican nomination, Romney was best able to talk fluently about a range of national issues, while building a national campaign and fundraising organization. Perry could not do the former. Gingrich and Santorum could not do the latter. Herman Cain couldn’t do either. Romney was by far the best Republican general election candidate of those who chose to run.
2. The Romney campaign’s weaknesses were real, but they weren’t simply the Romney campaign’s weaknesses. The lousy and incredibly expensive thirty second ads, the inability to correctly estimate the demographics of the electorate, the lack of an agenda that didn’t just seem like tax cuts for somebody else, and the inability to speak intelligibly to younger and nonwhite voters weren’t just Romney problems. These were the flaws of the majority of the Republican party in 2012. Karl Rove managed to solve exactly zero of those issues with his hundreds of millions of dollars (though it wasn’t Rove’s job to craft an issue agenda.)
3. Peter Lawler is right that maybe the key moment of the 2012 campaign was the Democratic National Convention speech where Bill Clinton explained why the economic crisis was the fault of the Republicans and the feeble recovery was not the fault of the Democrats. You could see where Obama’s job approval jumped from his previous range of between forty-seven and forty-eight percent to between forty-nine and fifty percent where it basically stayed for the rest of the campaign.
The Democrats treated the median voter as someone who needed to be reached out to and convinced. The Republicans never told a similar story about the causes of the economic downturn and how Republican policies would lead to broadly rising living standards – other than by extolling high earner, job creator, entrepreneurs who “built that.” And you know what? That Republican story wasn’t going to be told this year. It was beyond Romney, his consultants, and the right-leaning outside groups. Even if Romney and his allies had been able to craft such a story, I don’t see how they would tell it to the marginal voter(s) of the 2012 electorate.
The Romney campaign acted like the median voter of 2012 was someone who had voted for Reagan in 1984 and George H.W. Bush in 1988, but who had occasionally strayed from the Republicans when the Democrats had favorable circumstances and exceptional candidates in their favor. The Republican consultant class, at its best, has been about reassembling the Reagan coalition. And they succeeded in 2012. They got the band back together. Romney won the 2012 presidential election in the demographic America of 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1992. The failures of the Republican party to adjust to demographic changes and to speak to people who are too young to remember the Reagan presidency are not primarily the fault of Mitt Romney.
Update: I would add that I’m all for dumping and otherwise ignoring Romney. For all of his competence is certain areas, Romney’s approach to politics was to-the-bone cynical and, even if he wasn’t the problem, he was still a manifestation of the problem (sometimes cartoonishly so – as in the famous forty-seven percent remarks.) That the other Republican candidates were worse is not a defense of Romney, but rather an illustration of the depth of the problem. Let’s all move on from Romney as fast as possible, but let’s not put too much of the blame on him either. There is plenty to go around.
December 10th, 2012 | 9:47 pm
Brilliant, Pete. That’s pretty much what I was trying to say in my rant over the weekend.
For an example of a mainstream conservative movement spokesman (pretending to be a journalist) who really does seem to think that “the median voter of 2012 was someone who had voted for Reagan in 1984 and George H.W. Bush in 1988,” see Fred Barnes’s article in the Nov 19th Weekly Standard. In this piece, Barnes attributes the Democrats’ victory entirely to Obama’s personal appeal. Further, he insists that America remains a “center-right” nation and that Republicans retain all of the “advantages” they had in decades past.
Does Barnes really believe this pathetic happy talk? Or is he just trying to keep up “morale” among the GOP footsoldiers who read him?
By the way, it’s been pointed out that immigration cannot explain the Republicans’ disappointing results in Montana (an overwhelmingly white state), which was carried by Romney but elected Democrats to all statewide offices (including the Senate).
It should also be noted that, as I read in John Podhoretz’s election postmortem, Romney generally ran ahead of Republican senate and gubernatorial candidates in states where there was a genuine contest for those offices. Which supports your point that Romney’s deficiencies were not the heart of the Republicans’ problem with the electorate.
December 11th, 2012 | 12:57 am
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December 11th, 2012 | 8:05 am
The update sums the matter up perfectly. Far from the perfect candidate–who is?–some things can be learned from the loss, but the way forward is not to be found in blaming Romney. If there was a Republican besides Mitt who could have won–I always thought maybe Jeb–he or she did not run…so what is the point of dwelling on Mitt?
December 11th, 2012 | 2:06 pm
Prof Ceasar,
In what way would Jeb Bush have been a stronger candidate than Romney? It seems to me that Jeb would have had most of the same weaknesses as Romney – a plutocratic/Chamber of Commerce type with no specific agenda to appeal to middle class/working class voters, and who comes across as the sort of management type who tells people they’re being fired. In addition, do you really think that the American people would have been ready in 2012 to elect George W’s younger brother to the White House?
Perhaps you mean to suggest that more Latinos would have voted for Jeb. Well, maybe so, but I rather doubt it would have been enough to make any difference – or to make up for the votes he would have lost by reason of his pro-amnesty position on immigration.
It seems to me that Mitch Daniels might well have been a stronger candidate than Romney (even though Daniels could have been attacked for his service in the Bush administration). Other than Daniels – and I’m not saying
Daniels would have won, either – I can’t think of anyone.
December 11th, 2012 | 8:49 pm
Dr. Ceaser, I’m all for including Romney in the blame, because he participated in all of the errors of agenda crafting, messaging, etc. I just don’t think those errors are particular to Romney. They were broadly distributed among the Republican campaign operative/right-leaning consultant class. Romney just wasn’t the guy to rise above all that. At best, he could be a competent version of what these consultants thought a Republican candidate needed to be. And he was that (more or less.) His opponents were all far less.
There were people within the center-right who, each in their own way, argued for a more responsible and middle-class-oriented agenda. I’m thinking of Mitch Daniels, and Jeb Bush. I also think that Scott Walker and Paul Ryan made some noises in that direction (though one can question how middle-class friendly elements of Ryan’s original Roadmap were.) Among journalists you had Ross Douthat and Ramesh Ponnuru. I suspect that significant elements of the donor class would have been on board with something better and that those donors ended up with Romney by default.
But none of those guys ran. Is it possible that a better GOP candidate could have run and won in 2012? Maybe. I think Romney left some points on the field. On the other hand, it wasn’t really that close. Obama won by three point six percent. I’m not sure a better candidate. (and let’s remember that no better candidate ran) does four percent better. I don’t think Bush could have overcome the burden of his name. I’d like to think Daniels would have done better, but we’ll never know.
Maybe it took this kind of shocking defeat for a candidate who ran a consultant by-the-numbers campaign for the Republicans to really get to work at revamping their policy agenda and messaging instead of trying to just run another increasingly self-parodying version of the Reagan campaign.
December 11th, 2012 | 10:36 pm
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December 12th, 2012 | 1:52 pm
all sounds right to me.
and i can see republicans winning, as you note, with a better candidate and some kind of revamped message.
but will they be republicans prepared to do very much, or just another version of a caretaker party inside of a new consensus? will they stand to obama like nixon to fdr? some of the middle class appeal stuff sounds like that. i will end up voting for them, but what will victory mean?
the republican party as i see makes two claims: that it supports liberty, and that it is prepared to manage things better than the opposition whose approach to things is leading us at best to mediocrity and worst to economic crisis and perhaps foreign policy crisis as well. Of course, people can agree or disagree with the second point, and we won’t know until we know, i.e., until the policies being followed are seen in light of results and consequences, not just predictions.
the opening for republicans who can do something significant will come only at a point of reckoning, when/if the course of certain policies show that they are producing a disaster. when does the unsustainable prove to be really unsustainable? maybe, if we are lucky, americans will see examples of this close enough to make the requisite changes while there is still time…. both in domestic and foreign affairs.
as for 2012, i still saw a mitt victory 8 days before the election. only the explanation industry makes us think otherwise. and i surely would have liked his chances with a 9 percent unemployment rate, changing demographics or not. but all this has nothing to do with the future, anyhow
December 12th, 2012 | 8:21 pm
It is seems pretty likely that the Republicans will remain the smaller government, lower tax party relative to the Democrats. It seems possible that the Republicans would pull a Nixon wage and price control kind of play, but that doesn’t seem to be where their political elites are going.
I would argue that supporting health care policy changes in the direction suggested by Yuval Levin and James Capretta would be a move to the right even if the total amount government spends on health care would (mostly for demographic reasons) be larger than it was twenty years ago (though smaller than the Democrats might like.) Same thing with tax reform. There is more to be gained by a tax reform that is pro-parent, but also pro-growth and maybe attainable than never-gonna-happen promises of large across-the-board income tax cuts. And the alternative would be some moderated version of what Nancy Pelosi might want. The thing is that such a policy outcome would in some ways be well to the right of the status quo or event the pre-Obama status quo.
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