by Tim Alberta
Some variation of this strange sentiment, that Obama’s presidency ipso facto had ushered in an era of postprejudice America, became a trendy crutch for Republicans as bad actors in the party systematically targeted minority communities with racial gerrymanders and voter- suppression measures.
These institutional labors aside, lesser instances of bald-faced bigotry exploded during Obama’s tenure. There was the Speaker of the Kansas House who shared emails calling the First Lady “Mrs. YoMama.” There was the Colorado congressman who compared working with the president to “touching a tar baby.” There was the Orange County GOP official who circulated an image depicting Obama as a monkey. There was the effort in June 2012, led by Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert, to get the State Department to investigate ties between the Muslim Brotherhood and Huma Abedin, the longtime top aide to Hillary Clinton. (Boehner defended Abedin’s “sterling character” and called the insinuations “pretty dangerous.”)
The contours of the GOP’s racial paradox predated Obama. Using the “party of Lincoln” label as protective cover, Republicans could pursue discriminatory policies in one breath while debunking allegations thereof in the next by insisting that their ideological forebears had freed the slaves. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth: Southern segregationists fled the Democratic Party following Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, sparking a decades-long realignment that, with the aid of the “Southern Strategy” employed by Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, turned the GOP into the champion of the old Confederacy’s states-rights, small-government creed.
As Lee Atwater, the notoriously ruthless political strategist to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, once observed, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger.’ That hurts you, backfires, so you say stuff like ‘Forced busing, states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract, now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic. . . . ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’”
Even in the age of a black president—especially in the age of a black president—the return on this tactical investment was obvious. Romney was presented with polling on two different occasions that demonstrated the incentive of exploiting the dark side of populism. By making the campaign about identity, personal and national, he could drive a wedge between Obama and blue-collar voters. This was particularly true in the industrial Midwest, where many noncollege-educated whites had soured on the president since voting for him in 2008. But Romney refused. He would not hesitate to take hawkish stances on immigration, and his proposal of “self-deportation” wound up being a gift to Obama’s campaign. Racial dog whistling was something else entirely, and Romney made clear that he would not stand for it.
What exasperated Romney, as he endeavored to run a clean campaign, was the perceived double standard inherent to racial politics. That very year, in his home state of Massachusetts, the Democrats’ nominee for U.S. Senate, a law professor named Elizabeth Warren, had been exposed for identifying as Native American during her rise in academia. There was no evidence that this had accelerated her career; Warren was regarded as a top legal mind under any circumstance. Yet, as her star rose on the left, Republicans marveled at how a white woman who had claimed “minority law teacher” status at the University of Pennsylvania, and who later allowed Harvard Law School to present her as “Native American,” was at best getting away with making a mockery of affirmative-action standards and manipulating them at worst.
The lowlight of perhaps the entire election was when Joe Biden, who had recently impersonated an Indian call center employee and had once called Obama “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean,”12 warned a largely black audience about Romney and Ryan, saying, “They’re going to put y’all back in chains.”
Contextually, the vice president’s comment was part of a broadside against Republicans’ deregulation of Wall Street; Democrats said his metaphor was meant to play on Romney’s promise to “unshackle” the economy. But the inflection of Biden’s voice and the Virginia crowd’s reaction told a different story, one from which most reporters quickly moved on.
To the extent Democrats benefited from a double standard, Republicans had only themselves, and their real ideological forebears, to blame.
RACIAL POLITICS ASIDE, REPUBLICANS DID HAVE ONE LEGITIMATE BEEF. As the campaign progressed, and Romney exhibited a rare talent for quirk (“The trees are the right height,” he said in Michigan), a cruel caricature took hold of the nominee. He was unusual, out of touch, freakishly peculiar.
Romney deserved some ribbing, but the relentless focus on his idiosyncrasies was cheap and callow. One media-made controversy was particularly mind-numbing: Romney was widely scored for recalling, during a debate with Obama, how he had assembled “binders full of women” to ensure staff diversity as governor of Massachusetts. Democrats had spent the year cudgeling Republicans for supposedly treating the fairer sex like second-class citizens, yet when Romney offered the insightful story of how he’d once been sent nothing but men’s résumés for key job openings, Obama’s team, and the press, chose to belabor a single, transient, meaningless sound bite. It was this treatment of Romney that helped numb the electorate to more serious criticisms of the GOP nominee four years later.
Even so, Romney proved to be his own worst enemy.
“There are forty-seven percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” said the voice on the recording. “There are forty-seven percent who are with him, who are dependent on government, who believe that, that they are victims, who believe that government has the responsibility to care for them. Who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it, it’s an entitlement and the government should give it to them. . . . These are people who pay no income tax; forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax, so our message of lower taxes doesn’t connect. . . . And so, my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the five to ten percent in the center that are independent, that are thoughtful.”
The voice belonged to Romney. He had been taped surreptitiously during a May fund-raiser at the home of a Florida banking executive. Four months later, the tape was leaked to the left-leaning publications Mother Jones and the Huffington Post. It was an atomic bomb dropped onto the Romney campaign. He had been ruthlessly portrayed as an elitist snob with no feeling for the common man; now he was on tape moaning to fellow nobles about the peasants failing to take responsibility for their lives. There was no spinning the remarks—especially not when Ryan had been publicly delivering a similar talk about “makers and takers,” dividing the country between those who produced wealth and those who leeched off them.
Some of Romney’s allies urged him not to back down, believing that his remarks framed a sharp contrast of capitalistic individualism versus socialized citizenship. Years later, in light of how the 2016 campaign unfolded, some Republicans adopted a revisionist theory that their 2012 nominee would have survived the controversy—and won the electon—if only he hadn’t been so apologetic.
But the political problem with Romney’s “47 percent” remark wasn’t that it offended the delicate sensibilities of the left; it was that it unwittingly marginalized many Americans on the right.
“Most of the tax receipts come in from a certain number of these [wealthy] people, and the redistribution then naturally occurs with entitlement programs. If you’re going to take those away, that’s not necessarily a position that most of our voters would support,” Cantor says, recalling his reaction to Romney’s comment. “I’m not so sure the people who were voting for us as Republicans were, on the whole, as ideological as we thought they were.”
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sp; The country was changing, and so, too, were partisan attitudes. The Republican political class failed to see the ground shifting beneath it, operating as though its voters had a static worldview that aligned with the party’s intellectual elite. In fact, evidence had mounted since Bush 43’s reelection that on many issues, most notably trade, foreign intervention, and entitlement spending, the party’s base had become more populist than conservative.
The hints of this ideological volatility were sufficient to justify the “referendum” strategy, even as it made Romney uncomfortable and Ryan downright angry. The vice-presidential pick joined what he thought was a cause: drawing a bright line between two visions for America. When he realized that wasn’t the case, Ryan began griping—to his family, his friends, his fellow congressmen—that Stevens’s strategy was making it hard for Republicans to win and, if they did, even harder for them to govern.
“The Bush pivot from a national security campaign to ‘I want to do these entitlement reforms’ taught me you have to run on that stuff. . . . It convinced me that you have to run campaigns on ideas and you have to make them really clear choices,” Ryan says. “Stuart Stevens was the campaign strategist. I came on for the last eighty-eight days, so obviously, it wasn’t my campaign. I just think he ran more of an anti-Obama campaign: Obama sucks, therefore vote for Mitt Romney.”
THOSE LAST EIGHTY-EIGHT DAYS CONTAINED ENOUGH MELODRAMA TO fill an entire election cycle.
There was Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, the GOP Senate nominees in Missouri and Indiana, respectively, talking about “legitimate rape” and rape-induced pregnancies as part of God’s plan;13 Obama warning of “a red line” in Syria, raising the specter of American involvement in another war; Clint Eastwood arguing with an empty chair, imaginarily occupied by Obama, during a surreal one-man performance in prime time at the Republican convention; terrorists killing four Americans at the embassy in Benghazi, Libya; three heated presidential debates, including one in which Obama mocked Romney’s claim that Russia was America’s top geopolitical foe; and Superstorm Sandy devastating the Eastern Seaboard one week before Election Day, killing more than one hundred people and costing $70 billion in damage, capped by Christie, the New Jersey governor, heaping praise on Obama’s handling of the disaster.
Despite this roller-coaster final few months of the campaign, the fundamentals of the race remained steady: Obama maintained a modest but meaningful lead over Romney in the key battleground states. Meanwhile, the national polling suggested a dead heat: Surveys from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal showed Obama at 48 percent and Romney at 47 percent, while ABC News and the Washington Post showed Obama at 49 percent and Romney at 48 percent.
At the president’s Chicago headquarters, Axelrod and his team saw no path to victory for their opponent. Romney could conceivably win back the battlegrounds of Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina, but those states would not get him to the requisite 270 Electoral votes. Romney needed something else—Pennsylvania, perhaps, or some combination of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—but those states were locked down. The race, they told Obama, was over.
In Boston, the Republican nominee’s brain trust had an entirely different outlook. Ohio was in the bag, they told Romney, and both Florida and North Carolina were looking good as well. With Pennsylvania breaking their way late (as a flurry of their internal polling suggested) and Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota all in play, Romney was well positioned. There was none of the backbiting and blame-shifting that defined the final days of the McCain campaign. Everyone in Romney’s camp believed he was going to be the president of the United States.
This was a bit jarring for Reince Priebus to hear. The RNC’s polling, as well as national surveys he pored over daily, gave no such cause for optimism. “How is it that you guys are the only people in America that have Romney up, while every other public poll shows him down?” the party chairman asked Romney’s senior staff on a conference call two days before the election. The session descended into an argument over polling methodology and Priebus hung up, worried that his party’s nominee was walking into a buzz saw.
As the candidates ended their campaigning with a final push through the Midwest—Obama in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Ohio; Romney in Ohio and Pennsylvania—both felt certain that victory was at hand.
ELECTION DAY 2012 WAS HARROWING FOR THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.
The party’s nominee wasn’t the only one convinced he was headed to the White House. His running mate, Ryan, told his wife and children to prepare for a move to Washington—this despite Priebus warning him on Election Day that things didn’t look good. But something was in the water. Boehner, McConnell, Cantor—all the party’s leaders believed that Romney was going to win, and for the same reason: Their data showed that Obama had bled too much support among working-class and middle-class white voters, especially in the industrial Midwest.
Romney was paralyzed, then, by the returns coming in from Ohio on the night of November 6. He wasn’t just going to lose the Buckeye State; he was going to win fewer total votes there than McCain had four years earlier, when the race was barely competitive. The upshot was obvious. Ohio was Romney’s strongest state in the Midwest. If he wasn’t going to win there, he wasn’t going to win anywhere. He wasn’t going to win the presidency.
Dazed and devastated, Republicans tried to make sense of what they were seeing. Fewer votes than McCain? In Ohio? How was it possible? The comprehensive answer provided weeks later by Romney’s pollster, Neil Newhouse, was that two hundred thousand white voters who turned out in 2008 had stayed home in 2012, the result of disillusionment with Obama and distaste for Romney. But even before that analysis, the exit polling of voters who did show up told a simple story:14
22 percent of Ohio voters said the most important quality they looked for in a candidate is that he “cares about people like me”; Obama won 84 percent of them.
56 percent of Ohio voters thought Romney’s policies would favor the rich; Obama won 87 percent of them.
60 percent of Ohio voters supported the bailout of the Detroit automakers; Obama won 74 percent of them.
It was the same story in exit polling all across the country. Voters perceived Romney to be unsympathetic to the working man, an advocate of the super-affluent, someone who couldn’t possibly empathize with the struggles of everyday people. Obama’s team spent much of 2012 framing this picture, and with the “47 percent” commentary, Romney had colored it in himself.
“The reason I got involved in politics was to try and help the average American,” Romney says. Noting his struggle to connect with those average Americans, he adds, without a hint of irony, “The skill in communicating that is a particular capability that I wish I had in more abundance.”
Trump, who attended Romney’s Election Night party and recalls with a certain glee watching the candidate’s staff agonizing over the results in Ohio, says, “Maybe they focused on the wrong things and in the wrong areas, because they lost Ohio by a fairly substantial amount.” When I cite the low turnout of working-class whites, Trump can no longer suppress his grin: “And I brought them out in numbers that they never even knew existed. Because they liked me.”
Romney (and the party at large) also performed dismally with swing voters. Though he won independents by 5 points, that number was misleading; self-described “moderates” were a much larger chunk of the electorate, and Obama carried that group by 15 points. Meanwhile, Obama won women by 12 points, and Romney won men by 8 points; that combined 20-point “gender gap” was the widest margin seen in a presidential election since 1952, according to Gallup. (Some credit was due Akin and Mourdock, both of whom snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in losing their red state Senate races.)
“The dangerous Mitt Romney, to us, would have been the Mitt Romney appealing to moderate voters and suburban woman. And he never really got there,” Axelrod says. “He had to distort himself to win the nomination; he had to present himself as further to the right than he really was. I don
’t think closing Planned Parenthood was actually a passion project of his. I don’t think there was anything in his record in Massachusetts that suggested he would be a fervent anti-immigration foe, and as a businessman he probably felt the opposite way. But he had to paint this portrait of himself that would pass muster in the new Republican Party.”
Although Romney failed to turn out white voters in certain states, he did win an impressive majority of those who showed up: 59 percent of whites backed Romney nationwide, compared to just 39 percent for the president. This was 4 points lower than Obama’s 43 percent showing against McCain four years earlier, and the worst performance among whites by a Democratic nominee since Walter Mondale during Ronald Reagan’s forty-nine-state steamrolling in 1984.
It would have once been unthinkable for a presidential candidate to lose 59 percent of whites and still win the White House. But the acceleration of demographic change in the country made it possible—as did Obama’s dominance among minority voters. The president won 93 percent of black voters and 73 percent of Asians. Most alarmingly, he carried 71 percent of Hispanics, the fastest-growing bloc of voters in the country, compared to just 27 percent for Romney, the worst showing for a Republican since Bob Dole in 1996. All told, Romney won just 17 percent of nonwhite voters nationwide.
There were a few bright spots for the Republican Party. Two of its longtime conservative stalwarts in the House, Mike Pence and Jeff Flake, won their statewide races for governor and senator, respectively. The GOP kept the House majority and picked up a Senate seat in Nebraska. And a star was born in Texas, where a conservative firebrand named Ted Cruz scored an upset victory in the primary and was headed to Washington with a full head of steam.