Two kinds of lessons can be drawn from an election. First there are circumstances unique to a race that obviously won't carry forward—"47 percent," Bain Capital ads, and Hurricane Sandy were confined to the politics of 2012 and so are now consigned to political history.
Then there are trends whose implications will resonate beyond 2012. Here are three, all ominous for the GOP, which I call the hat trick of doom:
Pity party. Mitt Romney and his campaign are on the receiving end of deserved criticism for ineptitude. But his run also demonstrates a couple of structural problems with the primary process. The philosophical purification of the Republican Party has driven GOP presidential aspirants to try to outdo each other in demonstrating their adherence to dogma. See, for example, Romney's assertion that he had been a "severely conservative" governor; and see all of this year's contenders vowing not to accept a deal that had even a dollar in tax increase for $10 worth of spending cuts; and see Romney's hard, "self-deportation" line on dealing with illegal immigration. Such ideological contortions may appeal to conservative primary voters, but they hold little appeal for a general electorate that skews moderate—at 40 percent in exit polls the most self-identified ideology—and values compromise and balance. Obama, by the way, won moderates by a margin of 61-38.
[Read more from Robert Schlesinger in U.S. News Weekly, an insider's guide to politics and policy.]
And the problem of the GOP's departure from the moderate mainstream is exacerbated by the free-for-all campaign finance system that Citizens United unleashed. The "super PACs" had little effect in the general election, but they did have a pernicious effect in the primaries. Pre-Citizens, lack of cash would have driven former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Sen. Rick Santorum out of the race well before they finally were. But individual wealthy supporters kept their campaigns going, artificially extending a process that kept Romney "severely conservative" when he should have been tacking back to being moderate Mitt.
Revenge of the nerds. The Obama campaign set a new standard for grass-roots mobilization. Part of that was the campaign's substantial investment in paid staff and field offices. The Obama campaign had 786 field offices around the country, as compared to the Romney campaign's 284, according to one study.
[See a collection of political cartoons on the Republican Party.]
But the sheer volume of Obama's bricks-and-mortar operation doesn't capture the whole story. Tucked into a windowless room in the campaign's Chicago headquarters was its data-mining operation, unmatched in politics in size, scope, and sophistication. The group compiled vast amounts of data on voters and donors, and used cutting-edge marketing and research techniques to figure out how to motivate people to donate their time, money, and their vote. "We could [predict] people who were going to give online," one senior adviser told Time magazine. "We could model people who were going to give through the mail."
Ironically, it was the George W. Bush's 2004 re-election campaign that pioneered using private sector marketing-type statistical modeling techniques to identify supporters. But Democrats have dramatically advanced the techniques. "The left has birthed an unexpected subculture," Sasha Issenberg, whose book The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns details this evolution, wrote this week in Slate. "It now contains a full-fledged electioneering intelligentsia, focused on integrating large-scale survey research with randomized experimental methods to isolate particular populations that can be moved by political contact."
Obama reaped the fruits of this operation. Democrats had a party identification advantage of six percentage points, for example. And in Ohio the African-American share of the electorate went from 11 percent in 2008 to 15 percent this year. This technology gap should be a concern for Republican strategists.
[Read the U.S. News Debate: Does Barack Obama Have a Mandate?]
Demographics as destiny. Why were Republicans so blindsided by Romney's loss, even in the face of overwhelming polling data that showed that Obama was leading in most swing states? Conservatives assumed that the electorate would look more like 2004, when it was 77 percent white, than 2008, when it was 74 percent white. They never saw 2012's 72 percent coming.
Did I mention that Obama won Hispanics by 44 points this year after winning them by 36 in 2008? Republicans need to get right with that population and fast, and concepts like "self-deportation" don't help. "Sometimes the obvious does not become apparent until we have an election like this," Whit Ayres, a leading Republican pollster, said Wednesday. "But now the obvious is readily apparent to anyone, particularly any Republicans who don't have their heads in the sand … We have got to—through differences in policy, differences in tone, and differences in candidates—reach out in a way that we've never reached out before or we will not be successful as a national party."
[See a collection of political cartoons on immigration.]
Is the party's base ready to adjust its tone and substance on immigration? Pondering the country's changed demographics Tuesday, Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly said, "It's not a traditional America anymore." For four years, conservatives uncomfortable with the changes in their country could imagine the Obama presidency was an illegitimate fluke that, once brushed aside, would reveal "traditional America" once again. The country, Tea Partyers liked to think, could be taken back. But Tuesday proved that this wasn't about Obama but about America after all. "This is a new America," Dick Morris, an O'Reilly Fox-mate, said Wednesday. "This isn't your father's America."
How will querulous conservatives will react to that news? My guess is not well.
- Read Peter Roff: GOP Must Focus on Mobilizing Voters
- Read Susan Milligan: Mitt Romney Was Blind to Real America
- Read the U.S. News Debate: Should the United States Get Rid of the Electoral College?
Reader Comments (