by Charles D. Ellison
President Barack Obama was quickly dispatching Republican nominee Mitt Romney in a way that resembled somber cops at a yellow-taped crime scene telling rubber-necking bystanders: move along, nothing to see here.
Within a flash, Romney became painfully irrelevant. His hastily prepared, short concession speech was more like a board room Power Point presentation before weary investors. Rather than seize the moment for a chapter in the text book, MRom seemed fine with a foot note. He couldn’t reach the bar set by John McCain in his 2008 concession speech because there was none. The journey is complete. There is no political trajectory for the Republican party “standard bearer.” His political career is effectively shut down – no Senate seat to go back to. No Governor mansion waiting with open-armed staff, maids, butlers and cooks. Even Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan will have a Congressional seat to keep warm, and probably the same House Budget Committee chair.
While the prognosticators, eager for a nail-biter, kept painting an all-nighter narrative, the math just wasn’t there. Pollsters ruled the day, empirical Harry Potters who waved formulaic magic wands that didn’t lie. And with the Republican nominees continuing to poll poorly in their own home states, what made their flacks think they could pull out a popular vote nationwide?
Yes, the heads of many Obama-hating Republicans and White-rage posses of working class Southern and Midwestern voters collectively exploded on Tuesday night. This officially became the last election in which the White electorate could be the dominant electorate. But, we saw this coming. You can’t get away with a homogenous political party for too long while discounting the blatant population trends around you. And you can’t run a noisy ass primary as if the rest of the country isn’t watching.
Two main things happened here that contributed to the downfall of Mitt Romney. He primaried himself out of contention, allowing the fringe elements of his party to dictate the next thing that came out of his mouth. Unable to recover from his clumsy marriage to the right wing, Romney bumbled about through the spring and summer. He was like a teenager learning how to drive stick, wrecking the transmission with each raggedy gear shift. By the time he reached Tampa, the engine was falling out.
Meanwhile, Team Obama was able to successfully define Romney for the broader electorate while the Republican was busily plugging the leaks in his very White, very tax-cut obsessed base. They effectively set the contrast, Romney relegated to a Scroogy Bain-er, a flip flopping pathological liar who changed his tune as fast as you can flip radio stations. It was fashionable to now throw rhetorical eggs on the rich White guy, but he became uglier by virtue of the contradictions contained within his message.
This is why the all-nighter never arrived. This is why they couldn’t hit the numbers. Nothing complicated here. Nothing to see. Just a lot of talking heads on cable TV now staying up late to hear themselves talk.
By the last full week of campaigning, you could give your confident assessment of the electoral landscape. No longer could you avoid the question by faking on about how “tight it would be.” You could even wage a few dollars at any re-opened Atlantic City casino.
It was just getting too damn hard to beat Nate Silver’s analysis with anecdotal remote hopes based on the number of Romney/Ryan bumper stickers you would see during your morning commute. Folks like Sam Wang called it with neuroscientist precision. Mounting empirical evidence had been mounting for some time.
Related: President Obama’s Victory Speech [VIDEO & TRANSCRIPT]
[Photo credit: @BarackObama]
The fact that Romney was haphazardly shifting resources to reliably light blue spots like Pennsylvania and Minnesota was a master head fake exposed. Still, while the president returned to Chicago that final day, lounging over the returns and catching up on basketball, Romney was still frantically stumping through PA and Ohio in a junkie-like last-minute grab for votes. You could smell Mitt’s sense of inevitable loss.
The winner simply had more “pathways” in the final analysis. More groups and voting blocs to choose from. More colored Legos to build his ship with. Pundits were spinning wheels about the White vote as if it had been forgotten, but still mattered. Of course it did. But, we’re now at a point where it can’t do anything without other folks joining in – from women to a 10% Latino vote to a 13% Black vote to concentrated pockets of “special populations” in the states and districts that mattered. His 2012 coalition seemed to expand larger than his 2008.
Republicans also grossly overestimated their ability to use Voter ID laws and voter suppression tactics with strategic perfection. Clearly, the tables got turned, the blowback fierce. Once the Democratic Party apparatus finally caught on – after years of warnings from civil rights activists – the issue became an enormously helpful grassroots mobilization tool. That was as good a bogeyman as any rich White dude outsourcing jobs and making factory workers build their own firing stage. Threaten to take away an entire people’s voting rights, and hell was there to pay.
The president was consistent in his domination of the polls – for months. He began breaking the 50% ceiling, and week after week he dominated the “swing state” polls. Romney hit his ceiling during those two weeks between the 1st Denver debate and the 2nd Long Island debate. Momentum was gained from the President’s lackluster Denver performance because of the time afforded to the opposition to lambast him until the next debate. For two whole weeks they exploited vulnerabilities while simultaneously allowing the incumbent’s base to lament newfound bad fortunes.
In some respects, one could argue Obama calibrated debate #1: a calculated gamble to 1) let Romney speak his piece so he could surgically dismantle his contradictions and 2) get the left base so scared that they would be compelled to turn out. With Democratic voters getting overly comfortable with Obama’s pre-Denver poll standings, Democratic strategists worried about low turnout. Hence, the first debate may have been more a game changer in Obama’s favor than Romney’s.
Super storm Sandy, however, changed the game.
[Photo credit: @BarackObama]
T
he spigots opened up. An endorsement from The Economist within that same week seemed to say it all, a reflection of new confidence as he was granted the opportunity to look very presidential. To have a very center-right, pro-business magazine endorse the President when their very conservative readers revile him as a “European-style socialist” was like watching an alternate universe unfold.
But, it may have been New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s effusive bear-hugging of the President (when he really didn’t have to) that spoke volumes to a shifting political tide. Obviously, Christie is also working out a political calculus that explains his ambitions in 2013 and 2016. Yet, to a large degree, much of the electorate watched with awe as a highly respected Christie, immortalized by his keep-it-real style, seemed to endorse the President and fade away as a Romney surrogate.
In the end it was all about the brand. Running out of talking points, the Republican brand was just a bit too toxic to rise to the moment. You could see it in the downbeat, depressing campaign speeches about a broken America; folks wanted that locker room speech and, frankly, the GOP wasn’t giving it. That ultimately impacted Romney in ways we’ll still be assessing well into the 2014 midterm elections. It will take a long while for Republicans to accept, much less comprehend, the enormity of what just happened.
CHARLES D. ELLISON is a political strategist and widely known expert on politics, campaigns, crisis communications and media based in Washington, D.C. He is a Washington Correspondent for The Philadelphia Tribune and Host of “Showdown 2012” on SiriusXM satellite radio POTUS Channel 124 every Thursday 7-9pm ET. He can be reached on Twitter @charlesdellison.
