By Michael Tanner
Wednesday, November 07, 2012
There are no excuses for losing this election.
One can blame Hurricane Sandy for disrupting Romney’s
momentum; one can blame the impact of negative advertising or media bias. One
can credit the president’s vaunted ground game, which turned out to be every
bit as good as advertised. But this was a race that should never have been
close.
The economy may have been showing feeble signs of life in
the last couple of months, but it is hardly robust. No president had won
reelection with unemployment above 7 percent since Franklin Roosevelt; it is
now 7.9 percent. Three-quarters of voters thought the economy’s performance is
poor or just fair. Throw in a health-care law that voters opposed 49 percent to
43, turmoil overseas, and assorted scandals, and an observer from Mars would
have said that there was no way Romney could lose.
Yet Romney not only lost, he lost decisively.
There will be temptations to blame a poor candidate or a
campaign that squandered several opportunities. And it is true that Romney was
a flawed candidate, and his campaign’s strategy proved imperfect, too. He
failed to press his advantage after the first debate, and seemed to switch
positions at a whim.
But the Republican party’s problems go much deeper.
This represents the fifth time in the last six elections
that Republicans have lost the popular vote, and the fourth time in those six
that they’ve lost the electoral vote and the presidency. And although
Republicans held the House last night, they actually lost seats in the Senate,
of which they were widely favored to win control at the beginning of the year.
Clearly, something is wrong.
Much of the media will jump to the conclusion that the
Tea Party is to blame for Republican losses. Yet tea-party candidates actually
did well overall. In the House, fewer than five members of the Tea Party Caucus
lost reelection.
On the Senate side, tea-party favorite Richard Mourdock
went down to defeat in Indiana, a state Romney was carrying by a big margin. In
Missouri, Todd Akin threw away one of the most winnable Senate seats in the
country. But Akin, contrary to media wisdom, was never a tea-party candidate.
During the primaries, most tea-party groups backed one of his opponents. Akin
won because he had strong support from social conservatives while the other
candidates split the more economically conservative vote. Meanwhile, Mourdock’s
self-inflicted wounds were not a result of his tea-party background.
Besides, even if you try to blame the Tea Party for
Indiana or Missouri, what do you say about Wisconsin? Tommy Thompson was the
quintessential moderate establishment candidate; he’d defeated two
tea-party–backed primary alternatives. He still couldn’t beat one of the most
left-wing Democrats in the country.
Tea-party voters would do well to realize that simply
being anti-establishment is not enough for a candidate. Supporting a candidate
with the charisma and talents of a Ted Cruz or a Jeff Flake makes sense.
Supporting a Richard Mourdock simply because he shares similar political views
doesn’t work as well.
It’s also important that Democratic efforts to turn the
Ryan budget and Medicare into a bludgeon failed. Democratic gains in the House
were negligible; nearly all Republicans who voted for the Ryan budget were
reelected. Heck, Paul Ryan himself was reelected to his House seat. Even in
states such as Florida, exit polls showed Romney fighting President Obama to a
draw on the issue of Medicare reform.
Asked in exit polls if government does too much or should
do more, voters said “too much” by a margin of 51 percent to 44. Voters
certainly seem receptive to a small-government message, at least in some
respects, even when what appears to be a somewhat more liberal and Democratic
electorate is being polled.
So what went wrong? First, demographics. This election is
testimony to the fact that Republicans cannot survive by being the party of old
white men. The white share of the electorate has steadily declined for the last
several elections, and this time around, whites accounted for just 72 percent
of the vote.
Other demographic changes worked against Republicans as
well. For example, single women now outnumber married women in the electorate,
and they favored Obama by roughly 30 points. The gender gap overall was bigger
this year than in 2008. Moreover, the youth vote was larger this year than in
2008, and Obama dominated that too. American voters have changed, but
Republicans haven’t changed with them.
Republicans must face up to the fact that their hard-line
stance on immigration is disqualifying their candidates with Hispanics. Whereas
George W. Bush once carried 44 percent of the Latino vote, Mitt Romney couldn’t
crack 35 percent. To see why Romney appears to have essentially tied in
Florida, for example, just look to Obama’s margin among non-Cuban Hispanics.
Similarly, the growing Hispanic vote clearly cost Romney both Nevada and
Colorado.
President Obama is likely to push immigration reform in
his second term, and Republicans are going to have to find how to address the
issue in a way that will not cost them the Latino vote for generations to come.
Second, social issues continue to hurt Republicans with
women, young voters, and suburbanites. The problem is not just a matter of
their stance on the issues, but their tone. It’s not just that Republicans
oppose abortion or gay marriage, but that they often sound intolerant and
self-righteous in doing so. Romney himself may not have put much emphasis on
social issues, but the Republican brand was too easily associated with the
words of Todd Akin.
Christian conservatives appear to have supported Romney
by roughly the same margins they had previous Republican candidates. Exit polls
suggest he won more than two-thirds of regular churchgoers. But their support
couldn’t overcome Romney’s losses among economically conservative, socially
moderate voters in the suburbs. Republican candidates seem culturally out of
touch with a large swath of the electorate.
The GOP compounded this by indulging mindless “birther” theories
throughout much of the campaign, and by failing to offer a positive, hopeful
agenda for the future. In the end, swing voters were turned off.
Over the next few weeks, the experts will undoubtedly
pick apart the exit polls and the precinct-by-precinct results, but it isn’t
hard to see that Republicans are going to have to do some serious soul
searching in several respects, or this defeat will just be the beginning.
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