By Dan McLaughlin
Thursday, July 14, 2022
It’s the election that drove America crazy. Not the one in which Donald Trump shocked the political world. Not the one with six weeks hanging on chads in Florida, or the one with the pandemic and January 6. Not the one with Ross Perot and “bimbo eruptions,” or Willie Horton and Neil Kinnock’s speeches, or George Wallace and the Bobby Kennedy assassination.
I’m talking about 2012. Ten years later, the political world is still littered with its shrapnel. If 2016 exposed the destruction of the post-war American political order, 2012 was the election that broke it.
At first glance, this may seem an odd thesis. Twenty twelve saw the decisive reelection of an incumbent president, Barack Obama, who’d been decisively elected four years earlier. His opponent, Mitt Romney, was a conventional heir to a national political figure, running with Paul Ryan, a future speaker of the House. There was no recount, no riot, no major third-party bid, no party schism, no constitutional crisis. But a review of the derangements of American politics keeps bringing us back to 2012.
Post–New Deal American presidential campaigns were built around the swing voter: a center in the electorate that decided presidential elections. The archetypical swing voter varied by election: “Reagan Democrats,” “soccer moms,” post-9/11 “security moms.” Particular groups were contested: black voters in 1960, white southerners between 1968 and 1980, Hispanics in 2004.
Even candidates who were not ideologically centrist geared arguments toward voters who did not share their assumptions: gesturing toward moderation, painting opponents as extreme (1964, 1972), or capitalizing on sentiment for dramatic change (1980, 2008). A reelection campaign was the swing voters’ referendum on the incumbent’s job performance. Successful presidents grew their coalitions; unsuccessful ones saw theirs collapse.
Obama’s reelection — by design, in its outcome, and in how it was interpreted — shattered those assumptions. With the arguable exception of James Madison in 1812, Obama was the only president to win a second term with fewer popular votes and fewer electoral votes than the first time. Between 1812 and 2012, only Woodrow Wilson was reelected with fewer electoral votes, but Wilson added 3 million voters and grew his popular support from 42 to 49 percent. Only Franklin D. Roosevelt in his third and fourth races won reelection with a shrinking coalition, but he’d built a colossal majority in his 1936 reelection.
Moreover, if you believe the post-election exit polls (more on that below), Obama was the first winner since Jimmy Carter in 1976 to lose voters age 30 and over. He lost independents. He lost white women by the largest margin of any candidate since Walter Mondale’s 49-state rout in 1984, even losing white women under 30. He lost suburbanites. He lost white Catholics by 19 percentage points. He lost married voters by 14. You name the group assumed to be swing voters in 2012, and Obama floundered.
He also lost on the historic swing-voter issues. A clear majority said the country was on the wrong track. Obama lost by 22 points the 77 percent of voters who saw the economy dimly, and by 50 points the 60 percent who saw no economic improvement. Seventy-four percent said that the most important candidate quality was “vision for future,” “shares my values,” or “strong leader,” and Obama lost those voters collectively by 14 points. But he rolled up a lopsided 81-to-18 margin with voters who cited “cares about people.”
Yet Obama won 51 percent of the popular vote and 332 electoral votes. He carried 13 of the 16 largest states. How did he do it?
While weak in the center, Obama rolled up colossal margins at the edges: 93 to 6 among black voters (96 to 3 among black women), 76 to 22 among LGBT voters, 73 to 26 among Asians, 71 to 27 among Hispanics, 67 to 31 among unmarried women, and 63 to 31 among nonreligious whites. Racial polarization made likely Obama voters easier to identify, geographically concentrated, and disproportionately young, urban, and online. They required little persuasion; the challenge was to mobilize them. Base mobilization paid off down the ticket: Democrats won the national popular vote in House races and won multiple Senate races where they trailed or led slightly in Labor Day polls.
In short, where prior campaigns won the center, Obama appeared to move the center in his direction by using superior base turnout as a substitute for swing voters. Before 2012, this was the progressive dream; after 2012, it became Democratic dogma. The model was not entirely novel. George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign showed the way, with heavy turnout among exurban religious voters. But Bush’s base was still sailing with the tide of the perceived center of the electorate.
Black voters saw in Obama more than a mere politician: He was, in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s words, “not just us, but the Champion of our ambitions.” Jamelle Bouie wrote that “my Obama apologetics have less to do with Obama qua Obama, and more to do with Obama as black president.” Activating that sentiment required presenting Obama as an imperiled figure of cultural conflict rather than a public servant judged on his job performance.
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Obama strategist David Plouffe used the term “stray voltage” to describe this cultural-polarization strategy: say or do something to provoke outrage, often deliberately introducing easily disputed misinformation to induce responses. The resulting brouhaha would attract eyeballs and draw up sides. The campaign then revolutionized message-targeting on social media. Democrats’ near-superstitious view of the cultural power of social-media messaging — then seen as their superweapon — would only exacerbate their freakout when a Republican campaign used the same tactics in 2016.
In a January 2012 primary debate, Republicans were puzzled that moderator George Stephanopoulos was asking them about banning birth control. Romney called the question “silly.” The next month, the Obama administration issued a final regulation ordering employers — even the Little Sisters of the Poor — to pay for contraceptives, so that religious objections could be painted as a “war on women.” When Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke testified in a House hearing that she required $3,000 in contraceptive insurance coverage, Rush Limbaugh called her a “slut,” and Democrats had their stray voltage.
So it went. An Internet whispering campaign claimed that Romney would ban tampons. Vice President Joe Biden told a largely black crowd in Virginia that Romney and Ryan were “gonna put y’all back in chains.” Obama spotlighted the racially divisive shooting of Trayvon Martin. When Romney told a debate audience that he’d collected “binders full of women” — i.e., résumés to ensure gender diversity in his governorship — it was painted as a dehumanizing attack on women.
In 2010, Democrats held some endangered Senate seats by defeating unelectable Republicans. Leaving nothing to chance in 2012, Missouri’s incumbent Democratic senator Claire McCaskill spent heavily in the Republican Senate primary to boost hard-core social-conservative congressman Todd Akin in a three-way field. Akin fed the “war on women” narrative by making self-destructive comments suggesting that women who are raped rarely get pregnant and thus do not get abortions. He lost, and he took down with him Richard Mourdock in the Indiana Senate race, who also fumbled a debate question about rape and abortion. The success of McCaskill’s tactic led to its widespread imitation in 2022, with Democrats pouring tens of millions of dollars into backing what they see as their weakest Republican foes, with some successes in the Pennsylvania and Illinois governor’s races.
Obama felt, not without reason, that persistent questions about his birthplace were racist. Having let the issue fester for years as a deliberate stray-voltage strategy, he let a TV personality, Donald Trump, go out on a public limb pressing the question, then elevated Trump by releasing Obama’s long-form Hawaii birth certificate in response. Obama then went out of his way to personally mock and humiliate Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Even Obama aides look back with regret on how that stoked the sense of grievance that helped drive Trump’s presidential bid.
Stray voltage won. Worse, it was overinterpreted. Exit polls assumed that 23 percent of voters were white, over age 45, and without a college degree; census and voter-file data found the real number was 29 or 30 percent, a difference of 10 million voters. That means exit polls overstated Obama’s reliance on running up his margins, and understated his support with working-class white voters in the Midwest who saw Romney as an avatar of bloodless global capitalism. Black turnout was high, but a Brookings Institution analysis erroneously claimed that it was higher than white turnout and solely responsible for Obama’s victory. The myths traveled farther than the facts.
Obama’s dominance among non-white voters seemed to vindicate the most reductionist reading of the Ruy Teixeira–John Judis thesis of an “emerging Democratic majority.” Liberal pundits eagerly adopted a triumphalist framework: Republicans represented an inevitably shrinking minority, to be replaced by the growing Hispanic population. The GOP would be permanently locked out of the presidency by the Democratic “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Iowa. Republican victories in 2010, and later in 2014, were written off by the ascendant Obama coalition as artifacts of lower midterm turnout. Forgetting Obama’s appeals to anti-globalist economic nationalism, Democrats pivoted further to ally their non-white voter base with college-educated white professionals along cultural lines.
The resulting political theory was that Democrats no longer needed working-class white people or the political center. In this telling, only the Democrats’ presidential electorate was a legitimate expression of the popular will. Even in 2012, they refused to accept the verdict of Scott Walker’s 2010 election as Wisconsin governor and launched a recall that was roundly rejected by the voters in June, making the college-dropout Walker the first American governor to survive such an effort.
Misreading what Obama’s 2012 victory said about the electorate led Democrats down a series of blind alleys. After the Sandy Hook shooting in December 2012, progressives demanded national gun control. Hubris led the reelected Obama to waste precious months on this in early 2013, to no avail, just as George W. Bush had squandered his second-term honeymoon on Terri Schiavo and Social Security. Then, Obama shifted to governance by executive order — “I have a pen and a phone” — delivering divisive immigration-amnesty fiats.
Pushed by Biden, Obama in 2012 abandoned his prior opposition to same-sex marriage, the year after his administration stopped defending the Clinton-era Defense of Marriage Act. That stance was rewarded in 2015 by the Supreme Court, which invalidated laws passed by large popular margins in states including Ohio and California. Stray-voltage Democrats immediately pivoted to transgender-bathroom fights, Black Lives Matter, and an ever-widening array of “woke” causes. For voters in the electoral center, the pace of elite-dictated social change, in disregard of congressional legislation and popular referenda, was disorienting. For progressives after 2012, those people no longer mattered.
In 2013, Senate majority leader Harry Reid abolished the filibuster for appellate judges to get Obama appointees on the D.C. Circuit. Mitch McConnell warned that he would regret this, and retaliated in 2016 by blocking Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Reid’s move made no sense if a Republican might return soon to the White House — but the theory of an inevitable demographic tide seduced him into ignoring that risk. In 2016, Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet wrote that liberal jurists should rule as if “the culture wars are over; they lost, we won.” Three Republican appointments later, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
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For Republicans, threats of demographic extinction induced panic. Romney and Ryan had maxed out the party’s appeal to white suburbanites and found it a dead end. The RNC commissioned an “autopsy” that recommended bipartisan immigration reform in order to reduce Hispanic alienation from the GOP. Sean Hannity declared that he had “evolved” on immigration. A grand bargain was exactly what existing Republican voters didn’t want — yet rising Republican stars such as Marco Rubio publicly pursued it. Young, handsome, eloquent, Hispanic, bilingual, a Tea Party darling from working-class roots in swing-state Florida who ran as an immigration hawk in 2010, Rubio was uniquely well positioned to be the 2016 nominee. His participation in “comprehensive immigration reform” talks with the Democrats in 2013, driven by the specter of 2012, haunted and doomed that bid.
Chris Christie suffered a different 2012-postmortem casualty. Having passed on challenging Romney, he enraged many Republicans by greeting Obama with a hug when the president toured Hurricane Sandy–stricken New Jersey in late October. Christie’s obsession with winning an overwhelming 2013 reelection in order to re-establish himself for 2016 drove his aides to the “Bridgegate” scandal: deliberate traffic jams on the George Washington Bridge to punish the mayor of Fort Lee for not endorsing Christie.
Others went in the opposite direction from the autopsy: Fearful of post-2012 predictions of “replacement” by Hispanic voters, the GOP’s nativist corners fell to extremes of stridency embodied in Trump’s campaign promises to wall off the entire Mexican border.
Calmer heads, such as political scientist Sean Trende, noticed that demographic doom wasn’t written in stone. The comparatively low turnout in 2012 left a lot of “missing white voters” who were likely to be northern, economically downscale, and less religious — exactly the voters who swung into Trump’s column in 2016 as the party shifted away from Romney’s suburban strategy. But neither party was ready to listen to Trende’s message until well after the overreading of 2012’s outcome had done its damage.
The nature of Obama’s coalition and victory caught Republican voters by surprise on Election Day. Democrats had won only two national majorities between 1948 and 2004, and Obama’s 2008 win could be written off as a 1976-style fluke owing to the financial crisis. Many on the right expected a restoration of the natural order.
Some national polls had Romney leading all the way to the end. Romney’s strength among independents and other swing voters, twinned with apparently rising Republican Party identification, led some commentators to “unskew” polls that projected higher Democratic than Republican turnout. Dick Morris on Fox News predicted a Romney landslide but later admitted to Hannity, “I felt that it was my duty at that point to go out and say what I said,” to keep morale up. Nate Silver and others who projected an easy Obama win were triumphant.
Divergent information silos fed a plague of mistrust in polls among Republican voters, who went on to write off predictions of Trump’s doom in both 2016 and 2020, and a surfeit of overconfidence on the Democratic side, which saw all skepticism as unskewed polls redux. The former sowed the seeds of Trump’s stolen-election theories; the latter left the Democratic base to be shocked, and driven to their own conspiracy theories, in 2016.
The democratic system itself showed its cracks. Romney gained major momentum from defeating Rick Santorum in the Iowa caucus; only too late was it revealed that Santorum had actually won. In 2016, conservative commentators including Rush Limbaugh were still spinning the myth that Romney had drawn 4 million fewer votes than his predecessors. In fact, Romney’s 60.9 million votes were about the midway point between John McCain’s 59.9 million votes in 2008 and George W. Bush’s 62 million in 2004. What happened? Limbaugh had analyzed Romney’s vote totals in the week after the election, while California and some of the Sandy-impacted East Coast states were still counting.
Republicans’ traditional “nominate the next in line” sentiment yielded McCain, the Bushes, and Bob Dole. Trust in the party’s hierarchy collapsed after the fiascos of 2006–08. Presaged by 2008’s popular boomlet for Sarah Palin, the Tea Party delivered populist energy, primary wins, and new stars (such as Rubio and Rand Paul in 2010 and Ted Cruz in 2012). The moment demanded a presidential campaign that was more populist, more combative, and meant to do what it said.
No serious Tea Party candidate emerged, leaving instead the 1994-retread campaigns of Santorum and Newt Gingrich. Newt surged rapidly in the polls after attacking a debate moderator and won South Carolina in a blowout, becoming the only winner of South Carolina not to claim the Republican nomination in the modern primary era. Santorum won eleven states on a mixture of social conservatism and economic populism. These were harbingers. The pent-up demand that might have followed a principled Tea Party conservative in 2012 had moved on to something less restrained than Cruz or Rubio by 2016.
Romney prevailed with party-establishment backing, a gift for dividing his opponents, and demagogic attacks on Rick Perry as too soft on immigration and too hard on Social Security. Mitt pandered to the “severely conservative,” especially on immigration, yet he also held figures such as Trump and Palin at arm’s length. And in the fall, like McCain, he proved unwilling to get his hands dirty against Obama.
The polite, gentlemanly Romney was the most obviously decent and upstanding character Republicans could have chosen. Democrats and the press savaged him as a guy who wanted to kill Big Bird and let a woman die of cancer because her husband had lost his job and health insurance. Reid, in an exceptionally cynical move, took to the Senate floor — where he was legally protected from defamation liability — and claimed falsely to have a source who knew that Romney had paid no taxes for years. Confronted in 2015, Reid complacently quipped, “Romney didn’t win, did he?”
The September attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, spawned its own cottage industry of bare-knuckles partisan congressional investigations, one of which eventually revealed Hillary Clinton’s use of an insecure private email server for State Department business, with major ramifications in 2016. When Romney attacked Obama’s public response to Benghazi, debate moderator Candy Crowley of CNN chimed in to “fact-check” Romney — incorrectly, as it turned out — and Romney never fought back. Meanwhile, Ryan let Joe Biden repeatedly shout him down in the vice-presidential debate. Obama snidely responded to Romney’s remark that Russia was America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe” with a line that seems cringeworthy given the subsequent turn in U.S. relations with Moscow: “The ’80s called, and they want their foreign policy back.” Obama’s too-young-to-remember-the-’80s voters ate that up.
Obamacare’s mandates were the central partisan issue in 2012. Romney was compromised: He had signed a largely similar Massachusetts law. His strategy was to argue that it was illegal and wrong to impose federal mandates. The Supreme Court seemed poised to agree, and Obama responded with a pressure campaign unseen since FDR’s day to threaten the public legitimacy of the Court if it ruled against him. In late June, in a 5–4 decision, the Court upheld the core of Obamacare, with Bush-appointed chief justice John Roberts finding that it exceeded Congress’s power under the commerce clause but (in a passage that read like a hostage note) reworking the insurance mandate into an exercise of the taxing power. This, too, revived recurrent Republican fears of betrayal by the party’s own elites.
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All of this left Republican voters seething. Time and again, their champions were smeared and sneered at, and refused to fight back with the same ruthlessness they deployed against their own intraparty rivals. Republican campaigns were helmed and staffed with figures such as Stuart Stevens, Steve Schmidt, Matthew Dowd, and John Weaver, who turned out to have no regard for the party’s voters and no loyalty to its causes. The Election Day meltdown of the Romney campaign’s get-out-the-vote Web application (known as “ORCA”) became an icon of party-establishment failure. The hunger for someone who would give Democrats a taste of their own belligerent medicine was palpable — and people remembered the guy so unafraid of being branded a racist for hitting Obama that he went there on the birth certificate.
The madness of the 2012 election had only just begun.
