The Man In The Bubble--Romney Erred By Basing His Campaign On White People

Political pundits say white people killed the whitest candidate in America. Romney  wrote a check his behind couldn’t cover and lost the race because his numbers just didn’t add up in the real world.

If you’re basing your entire campaign on white people, it leaves you little margin of error. That’s where Romney’s troubles as a candidate hurt him. An operative in Ohio also admitted that the Obama abortion ads hurt Romney with women in the Columbus area. So too did the “Romney will raise your taxes on the middle class” ads and the ads attacking his tenure at Bain Capital. Romney couldn’t afford to lose any of the white vote, and he did. Since the attacks came at a time when he was short of cash, he was not able to respond adequately.

In the final 10 days of the race, a split started to emerge in the two campaigns. The Obama team would shower you with a flurry of data—specific, measurable, and they’d show you the way they did the math. Any request for written proof was immediately filled. They knew their brief so well you could imagine Romney hiring them to work at Bain. The Romney team, by contrast, was much more gauzy, reluctant to share numbers, and relying on talking points rather than data. This could have been a difference in approach, but it suggested a lack of rigor in the Romney camp. On Election Day, the whole Romney ground-game flopped apart. ORCA, the much touted- computer system for tracking voters on Election Day, collapsed. It was supposed to be a high-tech approach to poll-watching, a system by which campaign workers would be able to track who voted. Those who had not yet voted could therefore be identified and then have volunteers tasked to finding them and getting them to the polls. ORCA was supposed to streamline the process, but it was never stress-tested. Field operatives never saw a beta version. They asked to see it, but were told it would be ready on Election Day. When they rolled it out Tuesday, it was a mess. People couldn’t log on and when they did, the fields that were supposed to be full of data were empty. “I saw a zero and I knew I wasn’t supposed to be seeing a zero,” said one campaign worker. A war room had been set up in the Boston Garden to monitor ORCA’s results, but in the end Romney and Ryan had to watch CNN to find out how their campaign was doing.  In the end, the numbers guy was deprived of his numbers in more ways than one. READMOREHRE

 

Too many people thought Romney was stiff, unsypathetic and lacked empathy.  The very idea of  a person spending a billion dollars on an election and still not being able to win shows how disconnected this candidate was.

In other words, the GOP campaign was run in a bubble; a bubble that excluded mainstream Americans. It was a bubble that excluded reality, and real people, a bubble that convinced Obama haters that what the Republican stood for was what the entire nation wanted. It was a bubble that popped violently on election night when President Obama won the Electoral College in a landslide, and won the popular vote in with 50.4 percent to 48.1 percent. That is only a margin of 2.3 percent, but it was more than enough for an Obama win, and the GOP ticket failed to sway enough voters to their side because they were too confident. READMOREHERE

Romney spent too much on hate ads and not enough on policy.  The campaign spent too miuch on what was “wrong” with Obama’s administration, but failed to offer concrete substitutes. Ultimately,, he allowed issues to fall by the wayside while he spent his war chest on attacks.