WHERE DID ROMNEY SCREW UP?

It is my opinion that with a more cohesive strategy (and obviously execution at all levels of the organization) Romney could have won

Not that I disagree, but what part of the campaign strategy did you disagree with? I see several questionable moves:

1) He tried to run to the right of all his primary candidates. That lead to the "self deport" latino immigrant comment, the "don't support the bailout" fiasco and the "abolish FEMA" position.

This may or may not have been necessary to secure the nomination. Both parties usually require a harder line from their nomineee than suits the general election, however the one topic where he went further than I think was necessary was in terms of immigration.

It wasn't, I think, necessary to stake out a position to the right of Rick Perry and he should have understood that doing so was going to cost him more votes than he could afford to lose. He was never going to win a majority of the latino vote, but he might have been able to pick up more than he ultimately did get.

If you actually listen to the things he said, they were not outrageous in the sense that he came across as hater of hispanics, but he should have realized that hispanics were not listening to what he said, they were reading and listening to the things others said about what he said.

For instance, the dread Self-Deportation comment. When he first referenced the concept he prefaced it with the comment that we could not and would not round up 12 million people and deport them. His solution was poorly titled (and this is where the campaign came in) but not unreasonable. It focused on what so many immigrant advocates talk about: Having the people who hire the illegal alien pay whatever penalty exists and not the poor worker. Assuming this could actually be accomplished, it's fairly logical to conclude that companies suffering stiff enough penalties for hiring illegal aliens would stop doing so. If they did, the jobs that attract illegal aliens would dry up and not only would the influx slow to a halt, many already in the country would find that there wasn't sufficent economic advantage to remain, and they would "self-deport."

2) He tried to suck up to everyone. This is what gets him to make a birther comment at a rally and tell a private group of rich people he's not concerned about the 47%. You can't get a rep as a leader when you are brown nosing all the time.

To the extent this is true, I think it had minimal impact on the race. Nothing like this came out in the Exit Interviews I've seen.

3) He really, fundamentally believed his own misinformation. He was deluded by his own internal polls, ignoring all the information out there telling him he was behind and believing he was headed towards a landslide victory. As a supposed businessman he really should have known better. (To me, this makes him look more like the Bear Stearns CEO playing golf while is company is collasping than a guy with the right skills to lead the country.) With a more realistic picture, he might have been able to better apply his resources.

You don't know that he believed he was heading for a landslide. I doubt that's the case. All the polls were saying it was very close. No one was predicting a landlside for Obama, and, in fact, he didn't get one. If he like millions of conservatives didn't buy that the polls really were accurate and that Obama did have the necessary slight advantage, he wasn't alone.

4) He took his eye off the ball to try to get bogus charges to stick to the President. Bengazi was a distraction that got the base all riled up but didn't bring over undecided and used up precious time. The Jeep thing was a terrible distraction for his campaign at a time he needed his message to be sharp.

Well, obviously we disagree on Beghazi both in terms of Obama's culpability and it's use in the campaign. Personally, I think he needed to make this more of an issue. By doing so he would have forced the media to cover the matter more.

As for relying on bogus charges, this was precisely the Obama Campaign strategy and it worked very well. There's no reason that charges against Obama (legitimate or bogus) would not have.

The "Jeep thing" was a non-issue. In terms of impact, Hurricane Sandy and Chris Christie's wet kiss was much greater.

As for candidate quality, Mitt isn't bad especially compared to the others that put themselves forward, but he really at his heart does not understand how the average person in the US lives and works. Some of his "missteps" were blown up by the press and his republican primary challengers (like the $10k bet thing) but the 47% comment and the 95% of what you need to succeed comes from being born in the US and the "I'm a self made man and gave my father's estate to charity" comments show that he really has no concept of what your average person in the bottom two income quartiles face in paying the bills and trying to get ahead. Most of us don't have a CEO/Governor dad who can pay for overseas trips and Harvard.

Well, the American people, in general, seemed to have a different take on him than you after the first debate. They didn't think he cares about them as much as Obama did but the image you've relayed doesn't significantly appear in the exit poll data.

The Romney Campaign Strategy wasn't so much mistaken as it was non-existent, and in the end it didn't lose him the race as much as the extremely cohesive, superbly executed, and highly effective strategy of the Obama campaign won him the election.

Any other candidate with the record baggage he was carrying would have lost. They had one row to hoe and they announced it very early on: "Kill Mitt Romney." They didn't try to win new votes, but to do everything they could to get out as much of their existing votes as possible. Early on the president stroked the fur and the fire of the different constituencies that made up his coalition. The Romney Campaign had to see it coming and wasn't able to devise a strategy to counter it.

I appreciate that Obama supporters would like to think that the guy has done such a great job the last four years that it was just obvious to everyone that we needed to keep him on for another four, but that simply isn't reality.

In the end he won, and how he won has more significance for future campaigns than it does for the here and now, but there's a reason they call it Chicago Politics. It was smashmouth, and street level and it worked.

If it makes anyone feel better to insist that Romney was a horrible candidate, so be it, but if someone can win with Obama's record, anyone can...given the right strategy.

This victory was based on campaign strategy, not candidate quality.

Quote:

This victory was based on campaign strategy, not candidate quality.

And quite a good strategy it was. It recognized that you have to have a leader who represents the interests of all voters and not just white men, or the affluent, or the religious right.

I'm sure you think this sound sagacious but it makes little sense. Since white men, the affluent and the religious right make up a fairly large swath of the population, your suggestion that Romney limited his focus on a narrow segment holds little water. And why stop at these three groups. I'm sure you will agree that he appealed to gun toting 2nd Amendment fanciers, foreign policy hawks and right to lifers.

Meanwhile Obama appealed to just single women, Gay Rights advocates, union bosses, blacks, hispanics and the secular left (among, perhaps, others). The notion that he attempts to represent all of the people in this country or that he ran a campaign that attempted to appeal to everyone is just nonsense.

Romney won something like 49% of the popular vote. Now you may consider that to be just a insular group bearing no resemblence to the overall population, but then you are trying to paint Obama's victory with colors it doesn't warrant.


And Obama was the better candidate to appeal to those diverse interests, and the one who could form a more genuine empathic connection with the economic concerns of a struggling middle class.

Well yes, Obama was the better candidate to appeal to the diverse interests of the blocs he targeted. That's why he targeted them.

Exit polling results indicated that a majority of those polled believed Obama cared more for Americans than did Romney, but not by a margin that would suggest voters uniformly considered Romney to be unempathetic.

And whatever these polls indicated or what you might like the election results to prove, neither can be considered proof of genuine empathy. Perhaps Obama is truly very empathetic and perhaps he is simply a good actor. Neither the polling nor the results can confirm either supposition.

I think Romney also screwed up by not fully acknowledging the very real problems, and causative factors, that have hampered a speedier recovery from a devastating economic recession, and by trying to blame it all on Obama's allegedly failed policies. Romney largely denied that, in fact, the economy has steadily continued to improve, albeit at a slow place, but also at a pace which could not have been appreciably accelerated by anything realistically within the President's control given the economic mess, and the cost of two wars, that he inherited when he took the oath of office.

What were the very real problems and causative factors that have hampered a speedier recovery? Since you are able to accuse Romney of not acknowledging them, you must know what they are. And, I assume, you believe they have nothing whatsoever to do with Obama's policies over the last four years. Nothing he did was a mistake and everything he did helped push along a sluggish economy? You really have consumed quite a lot of the kool-aid.

Most voters were not as angry at, or displeased with, the policies of the Obama administration as Romney, or his strategists, apparently believed, and basing a campaign mainly on relentlessly negative attacks, and a return to Republican policies that were not all that successful in the past, just did not give the electorate enough motivation to deny Obama a second term, or to disrupt the steady progress of a still struggling and fragile economic recovery.

Technically you would appear to be correct since Obama won and he couldn't have done so if most voters didn't believe something along the lines of what you believe, but again you are cavalierly dismissing out of hand the 49% of American voters who cast their vote for the other guy.

As for the accusation of relentlessly negative attacks, you have to be kidding me! The Obama campaign announced in April of 2012, before Mitt even sewed up the GOP nomination, that their strategy was to "kill Romney."

The failure of the Romney campaign strategy was to wait too long to try and counter the massive negative ad campaigns in the key swing states.

And your allegation that Romney was attempting to disrupt the economic recovery is pure partisan baloney.

Voters are far more disgusted with the partisan gridlock in Congress than they are with the President, and, if anything, Romney's more intractable hardliner rhetoric promised to bring even more rancor and deadlocking rather than the inevitable compromise which is going to be necessary for any moves forward.

Yes, Congress has lower favorables than even the president, but once again you are trying to fashion a reality that fits what you want to believe as opposed to what actually is. Obama has been woefully inadequate in terms of fashioning consensus and compromise in DC. You conveniently forget the "Elections have consequences" comment and the invitation to an tirade of insults Obama extended to Paul Ryan. You also seem to accept as reasonable the suggestions by the president that Republican opposition to his policies is unpatriotic.

Obviously you were unprepared to give Romney credit for anything, but the fact that he accomplished anything as Governor of Mass. with an overwhelming majority of Democrats in the State legislature speaks far more effectively for his ability to reach across the aisle then the fact that Obama was only able to achieve any policy successes when he had a solidly Democrat congress.

Please spare me the inevitable claim about obstructionist House Republicans. The minority party with any clout always tries to obstruct the agenda of the governmental executive. (Believe it or not firefly this is the case for Democrat minorities as well as Republican) That's why it takes a real leader to break down the inherent politcal barriers to get something done. Obama couldn't (or more likely wouldn't even try) and preferred to fall back on accusing the loyal opposition of disloyalty to the country. Always a sure way to achieve compromise.

The tremendous amount of shape-shifting, and flip-flopping, also left Romney too much of an unknown quantity, and, I think, inspired too much uncertainty about which Mitt Romney would actually occupy the White House, and which special interests, or factions, might be controlling him once he got there. Given that the Republican party itself is so deeply fractured at this point, Romney's failure to clearly, and definitively, define himself, in a way that the average person could connect to, and be sure of, was a liability, and his frankly wooden personal style only heightened that drawback. When you have to work to make your presidential candidate appear more "human" you're in trouble.

Flip flopping? Like beating Hillary Clinton over the head for recommending a healthcare mandate and then imposing one through Obamacare? Like vowing to close Gitmo and then allowing it to remain quite intact?

All politicians flip-flop. It's just a matter of which ones get tarred with the brush.

Special interests? Like Unions? But of course they don't fall into that class.

You've actually, at last, hit on something accurate with your description of Romney as wooden and your point about his campaign needing to make him seem more human. It is what it is, and Lord knows Mitt could never be the Rock-Star Barrack is, but it really is a shame that someone who is uncomfortable with touting the many compassionate things he has done in his life is described as wooden or, worse, inhuman.

This says a whole lot more about us as a people that Romney as a person.

It was also a screw-up that he allowed social issues, like abortion and rape, and even contraception for women, to dominate the campaign discussion for far too long, mainly because he failed to sufficiently distance himself from the unfortunate, and blatantly ignorant, comments made by Sen. Akin, or from the very extremist positions of his own party platform on social issues that he allowed himself to be saddled with. This diversion, and the discussion it generated, really helped to solidify the democratic base, including the support of women, and helped to motivate their turn-out at the polls, even among the less enthusiastic Obama supporters, because of the specter of a President Romney's influence on future Supreme Court nominees regarding these issues. And the more recent remarks by Sen. Mourdock only revived the discussion once again, this time much closer to election day.

Yes, his campaign did fail in allowing the bogus War on Women argument to have a significant impact on the election, but as usual you fail to acknowledge that this was a major part of the Obama campaign strategy. This was yet another way in which the Obama campaign targeted a specific constituency within his coalition. It was quite effective.

The Romney Campaign failed in the same way the McCain Campaign failed, it shied away from getting down and dirty. The Romney campaign should have been airing ads in all of the swing states that made the very hard point that Senator Obama twice voted in favor of infanticide.

The notion that Republicans are extreme on the issue of abortion was helped mightily by two statewide candidate who didn't have the sense required to be in politics. Meanwhile the Democrat Convention was All Abortions All the Times and needed to be highlighted in Romney ads.

Campaign strategies certainly are important, but so is the candidate himself. Romney just lacked the personal charisma, and definite and clear domestic and foreign policies, to convince enough people that he was a better bet for the next four years, that he really would be better for the country. And, his main problem was that Obama isn't widely personally disliked--Obama's personal favorability ratings have remained above the 50% mark--even throughout the campaign--and, even though his approval ratings have been lower, he really hasn't screwed-up his first term in office to the extent that Romney tried to claim--things have gotten better in terms of the economy, one war was ended and the other is winding down, Bin Laden is gone, he can point to campaign promises he has kept, he has made statements and implemented policies to ensure greater equality for women, and gays, and the children of undocumented aliens, all of which promote inclusiveness, and all of which embrace the current cultural diversity, and the ascendancy of minorities in this country, which the Republicans are ignoring at their own peril.

Obama was just the better candidate, who also had the better strategy. Romney screwed-up by underestimating him.

Any candidate that can garner 49% of the popular vote is an effective candidate. Bad candidates like George McGovern get a whole lot less.

Winning an election that comes out at 51% -49% is about strategy and execution and not the quality of the candidate.