Politics What did Romney and the GOP do wrong?

That sounds about right to me, but I'm a northeastern effete Ivy-educated "intellectual." With libertarian instincts, to boot. Which is why I'm an independent. So my sense of what would work might not be accurate.
A nontrivial minority of the GOP, enough to swing elections but not enough to control the party, is religious social conservatives. That sort of person is a values voter, and won't be attracted to an "economics only" candidate. My sense is that the overwhelming majority of the GOP thinks talking about abortion is stupid because (at least for now) it's a judicial issue and not a policy issue, and would be thrilled to have a free people/free markets/free country platform without the social baggage. But not enough to elect a president. For that they need the evangelicals, and the evangelicals won't go along.

 

The Republicans reorganized in 2008 around the fiscal conservative message, and in 2010 they won a lot on that. The problem is that the social conservatives were right there waiting for them to get into power again.

 

I think that's a misreading. The Tea Party was very much NOT organized as a social conservatism movement. The media didn't know what to do with it, so they pigeonholed it into the categories they were familiar with, and decided it was just a bunch of angry white people with the usual conservative complaints. But if you actually read what the tea partiers were writing, it was almost totally driven by the debt and the explosive growth of government in the first months of 2009, and then by Obamacare. Which isn't to say that many tea partiers weren't also social conservatives. They were. But that's not what the tea party was about, and IIRC the leaders (such as they were) actively discouraged any cultural conservative messaging.

If your point is that social conservatives saying stupid things hurt Romney, well, yes. Mourdock and Akin clearly let the mouth run ahead of the brain. But I doubt your analysis that the GOP can never win the presidency again is correct. People were saying the same thing about Democrats in 2004.

 

the tea party was odd...i found myself at parties with the leadership of the tea party in this area a few times. they weren't one thing as people--what they seemed to share was a genuinely paranoid view of the current state of affairs, be fixated on debt as a kind of thermometer they could appeal to in order to spook themselves, and be new to political mobilization. the folk i talked to were remarkably naive, really--- reactionaries in a kind of pure sense, then. there were some other folk who i found more unnerving--strange cross-voicings of libertarianism and fascism, really. and some racist assholes. it became difficult to navigate the passageways to the vital hors d'oeuvres. particularly once i started to talk about my own political viewpoint. a fifth column.

it was fun for a while. then it wasn't.

but as a whole, it was a faux-news enabled conservative astro-turf movement the primary function of which was to force a sense of turnover within the republican universe as a way to create the impression of distance from the bad old days of the bush administration.

whatever it initially was, it got hoovered into being one of a range of instruments for mobilizing the ultra-right. my general sense is that disaffection with what it turned into explained something of the relatively high profile right libertarians had for a while before the ugly sides of that politics fucked things up for them. then they seemed to amused themselves by trying to fuck with the occupy movement in various places (philadelphia in particular). who knows why.

 

philadelphia? why philadelphia?

 

i don't really know. i have a lot of friends there who are involved with with the movement--or were, as i don't know whether it made the kind of transition that the nyc movement has made (a very interesting one, kinda out of the old-school acorn handbook really)---so knew they were a being a pain in the ass for quite a while.

you know how it goes--there's agreement on some problems, but as soon as the conversation moves away from the surface to explanations, things go all wonky...federal reserve, fountain of evil...fiat currency and all the horrors that entails...blah blah blah....

 

I'll be honest, I think you're all looking at the wrong data. Poll numbers are one thing that can be misleading, sometimes deliberately so. Look at it from the opposite point of view - how effective were the individual messengers at changing minds? Here's the return on investment for the super-PAC's.

Outside spenders' return on investment - Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group

That's where the money was spent and what the direct result of that money was. It even drills down to dollar amounts spent. This is by far my favorite analysis of the election.

 

I agree about the money and return on investment that has Rove on the hot seat now, trying to explain that $300-400 million down the toilet.

But other numbers were even more meaningful......the ground game. Romney campaign tweeted about their great ground game in OH and knocking on 75,000 doors on Sunday:

The Obama organization was probably the best organization we have ever seen in a campaign. Methodical, detailed, data driven and covering every base and every contingency with thousands of volunteers and field offices.

It will be a textbook for the future. The next Democrat may inherit the data, but it will take much more than that to match this effort.
--- merged: Nov 8, 2012 at 5:59 PM ---


Obama (786) and Romney (284) field offices.

 

it's interesting...the obama organization managed to remain relatively obscure insofar as the press was concerned. but the conservative machine was much less so. i remember seeing something about ralph reed, who was instrumental in transforming the christian coalition into the basis for the political organization basic to conservative electoral successes, being involved again in mass mailing campaigns and such. so i assumed that the election was, in the end, machine against machine, one of which was relatively invisible, the other of which was not. that would mean much of the reactionary dough was directed to the wrong sort of organization. i expect that this will not be lost on anyone.

 

The Republicans can't field a candidate that can be examined by the public for a long period of time.

Any candidate that the Republicans put forth has to meet the severely right wing requirements of the tea party, religious conservatives and the ultra-rich who want to be ultra-ultra rich. Each of these groups has its own wacky requirements and those candidates who don't "pass" their tests get kicked out, typically before a primary even becomes serious.

The Republicans' problem is that so many of the stances required to get through a primary are wildly off-beat for the average American. This is part of why the Democrats' tent is so big; people who wouldn't be allowed into the Republicans' tent go over to the Democrats because there is nowhere else to go.

In this election, the Republicans tried to get around their problem by nominating a chamelon for president. They chose someone who could pretend to believe that the earth was round on Tuesday and be chaiman of the Flat Earth Society on Wednesday. They thought that they could market a crappy president to Americans the same way that they market crappy weight loss products on late night TV. This time, the ability of the Democrats to conduct a campaign outweighed the ability of the Republicans to conduct a marketing blitz.




Side note:

I honestly believe that America needs multiple functioning parties to put forth different solutions to the problems that it faces. Having one party that wins just because its opposition is a mish-mash of bad, stupid and ridiculous isn't healthy. All political parties create dogma, no matter how much good they intend; the only way to solve problems is through a constant competition between rational alternatives.

Frankly, the far end of the Democrats can be just as wacky as the far end of the Republicans. The thing that keeps them out of the spotlight is that the Democrats need moderates (many of them ex-Republicans) to win national races.

I hope that the Republicans fix themselves so that we can have a real competition of ideas. Of course, for this they'll need better ideas.

 

I think the speed of the call shocked Obama's team. I was watching an interview with Bo Biden. He said he was in his dad's hotel suite and heard the networks call Iowa then went in another room for something. A few moments later one of the children in the suite came in and told him "we won." He told the child (his?) "no, no we won Iowa. That's just one state" and the kid told him "no, the TV's saying Obama won the election." He waked in the other room and called out to his dad, the VP, "Umm, dad you're going to want to see this!"

 

I wonder if the GOP assumes that the ground game setup will be dismantled now that Obama has been reelected? If they do, it's bad news for them. I've been saying the whole time who awesome the Obama ground game was, and I have a feeling it will be mostly in place for mid-terms and for 2016. The way they ran things made Nielsen and every other network look weak in comparison just because they new how to market and expand to such a microscopic level it was almost mind-blowing.

The primaries are going to be interesting to watch. If the GOP repeats what happened last time, they're doomed as long as the Dems don't try to match the insanity.

 

I'm kind of disappointed in both of their ground games to be honest. Nobody ever came by to talk to me in Ohio. Well, maybe a Romney person did, but I found the ad on my door after I got back from early voting.

My co-worker and wife were two real undecideds that got lots of phone calls, but nobody stopped by their house.

I got tons of e-mails from the Democrats, but there was no real plan or ads that focused on the issues that are important to me going forward. They had a good convention (that they should do every year to organize and come up with a good plan and new ideas), but also they should create a DVD or video of where they stand on the issues and why.

They also need to come up for ways to volunteer that don't involve making calls or going door-to-door. Organizing the base, doing good volunteer work in the community, and house parties where you can talk politics would be good things to do. Even a big on-line presence that would go on message boards and give out the facts and the plans would be good.

I did think Obama did an OK job with handing out bumper stickers for free this time, but I'm not sure how much of a difference that makes. It is cool seeing how many people are supporting your candidate when driving around town.

 

let's not get too carried away with this opposition between the reality particular to conservative land and "truth"---the worldview of a centrist democrat is heavily mediated by the same neo-liberal horseshit as is that of a relatively sane republican. there's no difference in kind. the problem is neo-liberal ideology itself. the idea that capital functions in an entirely autonomous manner, that capital creates wealth and that labor power is merely a variable cost is entirely insane. if you translate that into a policy logic you get--well---what we have. plutocracy. it's about fucking time that there emerges a social-democratic alternative set of arguments. neo-liberalism cannot win a debate with those arguments ethically or materially.

the tragedy of the american system at the moment is that neo-liberal horseshit is the only game in town. you have some outliers--hell, even krugman is an outlier in the reactionary context that the history of american red-baiting has created--but what this history has resulted in is a real problem. the lack of anything remotely like an organized left that has access to the dominant reactionary media is a real problem because the "debate"---such as it is---remains dominated by the same idiotic assumptions that created the economic crisis in the first place. and this, kids, is what political paralysis looks like. this is what we are in. this election is unlikely to change anything radically about that.

i am pleased that romney lost, but mostly because republican dominance at this juncture would be an unimaginable nightmare. their policy logic is entirely bankrupt. but let's not pretend that we are free of anything because obama won. remember the appalling record on foreign policy--continuations of the worst aspects of bush administration policy without the neo-con incompetence to make it's problems obvious. remember the obama administration's record on civil liberties. think of what the obama administration has made normal. think about kill lists and drone war. this is not an awesome situation. it may well be time for the left to mobilize and start bringing pressure to bear on these people.

btw---how did it happen that the occupation movement remained underground during the election cycle? was there a deal struck? with whom? it's interesting to see occupy nyc resurfacing by helping people in the rockaways in particular that fema could not help and that the city wasn't interested in helping particularly. they appear to have gone the route of alinsky. it'll be interesting to see what happens when the movement does surface again. this is not over.

 

Damn good points.

I was thinking about what happened to the "occupy" folks a couple weeks back and then, I guess since they weren't in the news cycles, I forgot all about them. This is the first I'm hearing about them helping out where FEMA has failed. Of course I've kind of put myself on a news brown out since the election night. Needed my life back.

Please post whatever you read about this situation.