Bubbles

The Republicans suffered from two bubbles that kept them from dealing with bad news.  One was the candidate bubble.  Karl Rove, as noted earlier, says that the Crossroads groups got no signal from the Romney campaign that they should keep pushing back against the Democrats' summer Bain offensive. At Bloomberg, Lisa Lerer says that while Democrats were defining Romney as the Villain Bain, Romney was focusing on his trip to the Olympics.

Romney’s campaign was dominated by an insular team that rarely tried to overrule the candidate. The captains of his effort, reclusive campaign manager Matt Rhoades and eccentric, message man Stuart Stevens, were survivors from the 2008 primary run. Others, such as senior aides Beth Myers, Eric Fehrnstrom, Peter Flaherty and Spencer Zwick, had been with Romney for much of their careers.

Still, it was Romney, chief executive officer of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, who insisted on going to London. Rather than pushing back on the proposal, aides added Poland to the itinerary to make the trip seem like more of a foreign tour.

It was Romney who refused to release his tax returns or talk about his personal experiences as a Mormon bishop, and invited actor Clint Eastwood to give an unvetted, prime-time convention address that quickly became a national punch-line.

There is also a conservative media bubble, as Jonathan Martin writes at Politico.  "Entertainment-based conservatives" want to boost ratings, not win elections.

The egghead-hack coalition believes that the entertainment-based conservatives create an atmosphere that enables flawed down-ballot candidates, creates a cartoonish presidential primary and blocks needed policy reforms, and generally leave an odor on the party that turns off swing voters.
...
The tension between entertainers and operatives-thinkers may have come into sharpest relief in the prolonged, and for many Republicans, painful 2012 GOP primary. The thinkers and the operatives cringed at the umpteen debates and carnival-like procession of candidates with little chance of landing in the Oval Office.

“Look at Newt Inc., [Herman] Cain and [Michele] Bachmann,” sighed Haynes. “What’s the purpose of entering a presidential primary anymore?”

Suggesting the incentives for getting in the race now owe as much to fame as to winning the job, Haynes added: “If that market didn’t exist, what would our primary look like?”

The sexual harassment scandal around Cain offered a vivid example of the different goals of the two groups. To the entertainment-based right, it was a great opportunity to rally the faithful against a purportedly liberal media targeting a black conservative. It touched almost every erogenous zone for the likes of Rush Limbaugh. But for the operatives and thinkers, the story threatened to tarnish the GOP with a sex scandal and make a martyr out of a marginal figure they were already cringing over before POLITICO reported the harassment charges.

GOP Polling Was Bad

Politico reports:

“On the Republican side, this was the worst cycle ever for polling and there’s nothing that even comes close to it,” said GOP strategist Curt Anderson, who helms the media and polling firm OnMessage. “It was a colossal disaster and it wasn’t confined to the presidential campaign.”
Anderson said the proliferation of different groups — campaigns, outside spenders, etc. — polling the same states had made it exceptionally difficult to decode the political state of play and develop strategy accordingly.

“It seemed like you had people taking polls in different universes at the same time,” Anderson said. “Three, four points [of disagreement], that’s the margin of error, but I’m talking 10-, 15-point differences.”

It’s not as if the party is totally at a loss to explain where it went off course. Sources familiar with Romney’s polling say that it underestimated the Democrats’ 6-point voter identification edge, nationally, and put far too much stock in what one Republican operative called “false signs of Republican enthusiasm.” Multiple Republican pollsters also acknowledged that they misjudged how many young people and minorities would show up to vote.

“We need to rethink what voters we screen out, because clearly, we’re screening people out who are going to vote, and that’s manifestly affecting the numbers we’re looking at,” said NRSC executive director Rob Jesmer, who said the presidential race effectively swamped the GOP “likely voter” model. “It’s more apt in a presidential cycle, but we need to think about it.”

One GOP strategist involved in congressional races said the party’s pollsters need to gather “a conference of sorts between all of them to figure out what to do going forward,” pointing especially to the question of how to sample cell phone users who make up a growing share of the electorate.

Coordination, Crossroads, and Romney

Non-coordination coordination does not always work, as we see in the Washington Post interview with Karl Rove:

Others in the Romney campaign, speaking on the condition of anonymity, were bitter that the super PACs didn’t do more to defend the Republican nominee and his business record, particularly in the late summer, when the campaign had run through its own primary-season funding.

“We didn’t have any air cover,” lamented one senior adviser.

That, Rove suggested, was the result of a missed signal.

The law forbids super PACs from coordinating with candidates, so it sets up an interaction that Rove compares to playing bridge, a game in which players make their moves based on cues from their partners. [See other analogies here.]

“We can’t talk to the campaigns,” he said. “But we’ve got to understand what the candidate’s message is by closely following their public statements and campaign activities, do a lot of research to understand what the weaknesses of their opponents are, and read the tea leaves.”

In July, after Obama and his allies began pounding Romney’s record at the private equity firm Bain Capital, Crossroads spent $9.3 million on ads in nine states, in which a female narrator asked: “What happened to Barack Obama? The press and even Democrats say his attacks on Mitt Romney’s business record are misleading, unfair and untrue.”

The response from the Romney campaign? Radio silence, which the Crossroads team read to mean the strategists in Boston did not believe engaging on that issue was important. So Crossroads quit running the spots.

Republicans, Reassessments, Recriminations

A previous post noted that outside GOP groups had a disappointing year. Politico reports that the Crossroads groups are under criticism for emphasizing TV ads:

In fact, donors are starting to question the fundamental strategy of Crossroads and other groups that spent primarily on advertising, said Drew Ryun, who helped start or run two groups — the Madison Project and American Majority Action — that focused almost exclusively on ground organizing.

“In that reassessment, folks like Karl Rove and Carl Forti are going to take a beating,” Ryun said, referring to Crossroads’ political director Forti, a Rove protegé. “If Rove is not done, he is dangerously close to it.”

Asked about how the results reflect on Rove’s strategy, Wyoming mega-donor Foster Friess, who says he donated to Crossroads GPS, said he was planning to shift his cash from television ads to grass-roots organizing. “I’m not a big fan of TV ads — they’re just too quick. They are sound bites.”

Rove still has plenty of defenders in the GOP establishment and its mega-donor base.
“Anybody who says that Karl Rove is somehow diminished or marginalized is not thinking clearly. He is a well-regarded, well respected organizer and analyst and he will continue to be so,” former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty told POLITICO.

From Resurgent Republic's post-election survey:

The Obama campaign strategy of turning out its base is reflected by the fact that 57 percent of Democrats were personally contacted, while 45 percent of Republicans were personally contacted by the Romney campaign. The margin is smaller when considering those who were contacted five or more times, 28 percent of Democrats by the Obama campaign and 25 percent of Republicans by the Romney campaign.

The survey, however, did not ask whether the contact was by means of face-to-face conversation (effective) or robocall (ineffective and often counterproductive).

What now?  The Washington Post reports:

Where until now it battled only in general elections and against Democrats, Crossroads is considering whether to start picking sides in Republican primaries. The idea would be to boost the candidate it deems most electable and avoid nominating the kind of flawed and extreme ones who cost the party what should otherwise have been easy Senate wins in Florida, Missouri and Indiana.

That, however, could put Crossroads at odds with the tea party and other groups that devote their energies to promoting the most ideologically pure contenders.

Crossroads also is likely to invest more deeply in organizations such as the Republican State Leadership Committee,which has been trying to build a more appealing GOP farm team by, among other things, recruiting Hispanic candidates to run for state-level office.

And it is raising money to run advertising shoring up the congressional Republicans during the upcoming negotiations to avert the “fiscal cliff.”

Did Obama Have Senate Coattails?

In this election, Democrats unexpectedly scored a net gain of two Senate seats.  Were President Obama's coattails responsible?  To find out, we can look at the 11 Democratic victories in races that RealClearPolitics rated as "tossups" or "leans."  In the table below, we compare the percentage of the vote for the winning Senate candidate and President Obama

		D Senate	Obama
Connecticut	Murphy	55.2%	58.4%
Florida	Nelson	55.2%	50.0%
Indiana	Donnelly	49.9%	43.8%
Massachusetts	Warren	53.7%	60.7%
Missouri	McCaskill	54.7%	44.3%
Montana	Tester	48.7%	41.8%
North Dakota	Heitkamp	50.5%	38.9%
Ohio	Brown	50.3%	50.1%
Pennsylvania	Casey	53.6%	52.0%
Virginia	Kaine	52.5%	50.8%
Wisconsin	Baldwin	51.5%	52.8%

Only in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin did the president get a higher percentage of the vote than the winning Senate candidate, and only in Massachusetts was the difference more than five percent.  We have to conclude that the evidence for any coattail effect is very weak.

Beating a Dead Orca

Previous posts have discussed the Romney campaign's Orca debacle and other campaign problems, but new reporting continues to surface. From Politico:

Numerous Republicans in and around the Romney campaign called the ORCA platform a total bust, stranding thousands of volunteers without a way of reporting data back to headquarters and leaving Romney central command without a clear view of developments on the ground.

The system was not shared with officials outside a small group in Boston and was kept largely a secret until the immediate lead-up to Election Day. The system was beta-tested on its own but not within technical infrastructure of the Boston TD Garden, where the Romney campaign’s massive War Room was set up. That accounted for a number of the problems, officials conceded, even as they protested to POLITICO the depth of the Election Day meltdown.

Three sources described the campaign to POLITICO as “flying blind” on Tuesday in terms of targeting, with ORCA — which had a pricetag of hundreds of thousands of dollars — failing. There was another sizable allocation of funds for emergency robocalls to goose turnout late in the day in key areas identified by ORCA, but those were never put to widespread use.

John Dickerson writes at Slate that the failure went beyond technology:

How did the Romney team get it so wrong? According to those involved, it was a mix of believing anecdotes about party enthusiasm and an underestimation of their opponents’ talents. The Romney campaign thought Obama’s base had lost its affection for its candidate. They believed Obama would win only if he won over independent voters. So Romney focused on independents and the economy, which was their key issue. The Republican ground game was focused on winning those voters. “We thought the only way to win was doing well with independents and we were kicking ass with independents,” says a top aide. One senior adviser bet me that if Obama won Ohio, he would donate $1,000 per point to my favorite charity. (That would be a $10,000 hit since Romney lost Ohio but won independents by 10 points). In the end, Romney won independents nationally by five points—and it didn’t matter one bit.

Dickerson also makes an important point: that the ballot-integrity efforts not only failed in court but also may have backfired badly by stirring hostility to the GOP:

The energetic attempts by Republicans in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida to limit voting in a way that disproportionately penalizes African-American neighborhoods might also have helped turn out the Democratic base. What role these acts played is not entirely clear, but it certainly didn’t hurt the Obama team’s effort to inspire African-American voters.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

One top Romney Ohio campaign aide, who declined to be named, also defended the campaign's strategy and attributed the loss to an unexpectedly large turnout among African-American voters.

Exit polls pointed to a rise from 2008 in turnout among black voters, from 13% to 15% of the total Ohio electorate. Still, President Barack Obama is now 38,000 votes shy of his 2008 tally in Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, the city with the state's largest concentration of African-American voters.

Mike Dawson, an Ohio GOP strategist, notes that six of the top 10 counties in which Mr. Romney outperformed George W. Bush's vote count in 2004 were all in southeastern Ohio, where Mr. Romney's pro-coal message resonated.

"But eight of the 10 counties where Romney did worse than Bush were all in the northwest of the state—auto country," Mr. Dawson said, adding that those counties are far more populated than the coal area of the state. "Clearly the auto issue was very significant."

Once all the votes are tallied, total turnout in Ohio may approach what it was in 2008, even including the 75,000 or so Ohio voters who went to the polls but decided not to cast a ballot in the presidential contest.

Pete Sessions

Politico reports that NRCC chair Pete Sessions (R-TX) played a big part in protecting the GOP majority:

Sessions engineered a series of behind-the-scenes moves over the course of the cycle that paid big dividends on Tuesday, according to accounts of his actions that were kept under wraps during the campaign but shared with POLITICO afterward. He devised a blueprint to nearly wipe out the remaining Blue Dog Democrats, who for years had impeded Republican gains in the South. He persuaded wavering Republican lawmakers not to retire. And Sessions helped devise a strategy to neutralize the Medicare issue, which Democrats believed they’d use to beat the GOP back into the minority

In 2011, a New York special election alarmed Republicans when Democrat Kathy Hochul won an upset victory, in part over Medicare.  But NRCC bounced back in a Nevada special by accusing Democrats of raiding Medicare to pay for Obamacare.

The 2012 election presented Sessions a far more challenging environment than in 2010, when Republicans had strong national tailwinds. One potential obstacle was Paul Ryan’s selection as vice presidential nominee, which thrust Medicare — an issue that has long haunted Republicans —front and center.

As Republicans flooded the NRCC with worried emails, Sessions responded with calm. The blueprint to follow, he told them, was a Nevada 2011 special election in which Republicans hit back by arguing that President Barack Obama’s health care bill hurt the popular program.

As a previous post explained, the Republicans fought the issue to a draw.