by Balz, Dan
Hart asked a twenty-five-year-old man what worried him most. “If I’m going to have a job,” he said. “In my family, I’ve seen the economy hounds hit. My father was laid off for many years and then just recently it’s come to hit me as well.” Hart asked the others how many knew someone in their immediate family who had been laid off or lost a job during the recession. Seven of twelve raised their hands. One woman said, “The America I grew up knowing isn’t the America I know today.” Hart asked if anyone around the table felt worry-free. “You’d have to define worry-free,” a woman said. “I mean, I can put food on my table. I have no problem putting food on my table. But will I able to retire at sixty, seventy, seventy-five? I have no idea.” Hart then asked whether they thought the next generation would be better off than they were. This has always been a hallmark of the American experience, the boundless optimism that holds that the future will be better than the present and that each succeeding generation will live more comfortable lives than the previous. Only three hands went up around the table. Nine members of the group were betting against the American dream, saying they believed the next generation would be less prosperous than their generation.
Two months later, Hart convened the second of his groups. This time he invited all Republicans to a facility in Fairfax, Virginia, in one of the most contested areas of the 2012 election. He found the same pessimism around the table that he had discovered in Cincinnati. When he asked for a word or phrase to describe America at that moment, the answers wove another tapestry of fear and disappointment. “How many people say, ‘I think this is the start of a downward decline’?” Hart asked. “We’re going around. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight—eight out of twelve of you. Why?” A thirty-five-year-old tax preparer was the first to respond. “We’re not sure really, as a society, we’re not really sure where we should be heading. And we have a leader that’s not taking the reins and pointing us in the proper direction.” A fifty-nine-year-old realtor, the most conservative member of the group, said, “I think there’s too many people on the government dole or on the take. And I’m afraid the balance is already tipped. And when the balance is tipped, then they’re always going to be voting for what they’re going to get for nothing.” One of the youngest people at the table said, “I would say that I’m no longer hopeful that I think things are going to get better before they get substantially worse. I always thought things kind of just got better. I don’t think that anymore.” Hart then asked the twelve participants the same question he had asked in Cincinnati: Would the next generation be better off than the current? This time, not a single hand was raised.
For the next year, Hart traveled through the battleground states as he plumbed the opinions of voters. He heard a consistent refrain: pessimism bordering on despair about the political system, disappointment in the president, lack of connection with Romney, concerns about the Republican Party. In June 2012, he convened a group in the Denver suburbs. He found that only four of ten people who had supported Obama in 2008 were definitely in his camp again. The members of this group saw the economy as still troubled, but with signs of improvement. “President Obama’s challenge is not in the current conditions, but rather, in contending with voters’ disappointment in their unmet high expectations,” he later wrote. “Even more, these participants have no idea where we go from here. The president has not drawn a roadmap, nor has he provided any real perspective of where we are currently.” But Romney had not broken through. “When asked to write down what they know about him, most wrote either nothing at all or broad generalities that could describe any Republican candidate,” he said. Obama had not escaped from either the economy or the sense of personal disappointment in his leadership. Romney was, as Hart noted, still just a stick figure rather than a fully formed challenger.
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In the spring of 2012, America reached a long-expected tipping point. Minority births outnumbered those of whites for the first time since the founding of the nation. Minorities—blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and others—accounted for 50.4 percent of all births in the country over the previous year. William Frey, one of the nation’s leading demographers, described it as a “transformation from a mostly white baby boomer culture to the more globalized multiethnic country that we are becoming.” The tipping point had been years in the making. Each census over the past three decades provided more evidence that America was undergoing one of the most important cultural and demographic upheavals in its history.
The 2010 census showed a slowing in the nation’s population growth—the lowest rate of increase since the Depression, thanks in part to the impact of the 2008 recession and a reduced rate of immigration. Frey’s essay “The 2010 Census: America on the Cusp,” which he prepared for the Milken Institute Review, sketched in detail the new America of the twenty-first century. America’s population grew by 27.3 million during the decade, but whites accounted for just 2.3 million of the total, or 8 percent. Whites still maintained the majority of the population—64 percent—and would for many years to come. But among those under age eighteen, there was an absolute decline in the number of whites in America during the ten years between 2000 and 2010. And yet that America was aging was also one of the messages of the new census. The fastest-growing segment of the population by age were those forty-five and over, as baby boomers moved toward retirement. The fastest-growing segment of the population by race was Hispanics. The demographic differences between these two groups provided a stark reminder of America’s future, with the two poised for conflict over scarce resources as an older, whiter population gradually gives way to rising generations whose members are significantly more diverse and whose attitudes about race and gender are far different. Frey pointed to another tipping point in the country’s demographics. “For the first time, households headed by married couples were less than half the total,” he said. Only a fifth of all households were what we think of as traditional families: two parents with children. Sixty years earlier, these families made up 80 percent of American households.
All of this added up to trouble for the Republican Party. In the competition for votes, Obama and the Democrats were on the side of the rising America. It was no secret that Obama did better with younger voters, with minorities, with singles rather than marrieds, with women more than men. Meanwhile, Romney and the Republicans represented a coalition that was fast losing numbers and threatened with the loss of political power. When Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, whites accounted for 89 percent of the electorate. When Obama won in 2008, the white share of the vote had fallen to 74 percent. The Republicans couldn’t hold back the glacial strength of demographic change that continued to scour and remake the political landscape. Given that, where they had failed was in not doing anything significant to alter the balance of power in the battle for political support among these newer voters.
Frey sketched out Romney’s challenge in another research paper. He ran three scenarios for the 2012 election. The first was based on an electorate that looked almost identical to that of 2008 in terms of demographic shares and the candidates’ margins among whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. Under those conditions, Obama was headed toward an electoral landslide with more than 350 electoral votes. A second scenario called for an electorate closer to that of 2004, when Republicans equaled the percentage of Democrats. Under that scenario, Romney was the projected winner with 286 electoral votes. A third scenario blended the first two: white turnout and margins similar to 2008, minority turnout and margins what they were in 2008. Obama was the projected winner of that one as well, with 292. The census findings underscored that, at the starting gate, Romney and the Republicans were running uphill.
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The other force shaping the election was the deep polarization that affected almost every aspect of American politics—in political terms something nearly as powerful as the demographic changes under way. America was a country of opposing camps. Obama had run
with the promise that he would unite red America and blue America. Three years into his presidency, the divisions were more sharply etched than ever. More than any general feelings about the direction of the country or the state of the economy, more than the pervasive frustrations with gridlock and bickering in Washington, these political and cultural divisions profoundly shaped attitudes and set the parameters for the coming clash between Obama and the Republicans. Those on one side believed they were an expression of the values of a new multiethnic, multicultural, and increasingly tolerant America, the rising America of the twenty-first century. Those on the other saw themselves as guardians of the traditional values and traditional families that had built the country into the envy of the world in the previous century and that they believed should remain at its core. These opposing camps were divided almost evenly in terms of size, with a shrinking number of independents in the middle.
The country had seen some of the same during the presidency of George W. Bush. He became the most polarizing president in American history, measured by the gulf in his approval rating between Republicans and Democrats, until Obama came into office. Obama as polarizer was always there in plain sight, particularly in the late stages of the 2008 campaign when there were ugly expressions about him at Republican rallies. But it was either overlooked or ignored. Gary Jacobson of the University of California, San Diego, noted that Obama had won 53 percent of the popular vote in 2008, the highest percentage for any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide. But he also pointed out that Obama’s coalition included one of the smallest shares ever of voters who did not identify with the party of the winning candidate.
Geographic voting patterns were more fixed than ever. Fewer counties were up for grabs. Bill Bishop, a journalist and geographic demographer and author of the book The Big Sort, tracked the change over time in presidential margins by county. In 1976, about a quarter of the population lived in counties where the winner’s victory margin was twenty points or more. By 2008, about half the population lived in counties where the winner’s margin was twenty or more. A close look at the decade’s election returns showed the rigidity of county-by-county leanings. Between Bush’s win in 2004 and Obama’s in 2008, just 382 of 3,147 counties in the United States went from one party to the other. Most of those—338—had moved toward the Democrats.
Partisan self-identification defined the critical differences in attitudes far more than traditional demographic measures, which once had been the standard. A Pew Research Center study reported, “As Americans head to the polls this November, their values and basic beliefs are more polarized along partisan lines than at any point in the past 25 years. Unlike in 1987, when this series of surveys began, the values gap between Republicans and Democrats is now greater than gender, age, race or class divides.” Over a series of forty-eight measures of values, the average difference between Republicans and Democrats had doubled in a quarter century. And nearly all of the increase, the study said, occurred during Bush’s and Obama’s presidencies. The summer 2012 study by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation compared attitudes with a similar study done fourteen years earlier. The findings underscored how the partisan divisions had become the new normal in America. In 1998, 41 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats called themselves “strong” partisans. In the new study, 65 percent of Republicans and 62 percent of Democrats now identified themselves that way. As in the Pew survey, there was a wide and growing gulf in attitudes about the federal government. A solid majority of Republicans offered consistently high scores on limiting government’s role, while a solid majority of Democrats were clustered at the other end of the scale—sharp changes from fourteen years earlier. On social issues, the gaps were similarly large.
With so many families worried about the economy, Obama had little hope of matching his performance in his first campaign. He would have to keep his losses to a minimum. With the country divided along partisan and ideological lines, each candidate would have to play to his base. And given the depth and breadth of the polarization, fewer voters were going to be truly up for grabs, no matter how it appeared at first blush. Mobilization would become more important than persuasion. The conditions pointed to an ugly and grinding general election campaign.
CHAPTER 20
Defining Battle
On May 15, 2012, the Obama campaign began airing a television commercial called “Steel.” It was unusually long for a political ad—two minutes rather than the customary thirty seconds—and it aired in only a few markets. The ad profiled a steel company, GST Steel in Kansas City, after Bain Capital had purchased it. The story was told from the point of view of workers who lost their jobs and their health and retirement benefits when the company eventually went bankrupt. The ad was understated in tone, devastating in content. It opened with one of the workers, Joe Soptic, who said, “I was a steelworker for thirty years. We had a reputation for quality products. It was something that was American made. And we weren’t rich, but I was able to put my daughter through college. . . . That stopped with the sale of the plant to Bain Capital.” The ad cut to a still photo of a younger Mitt Romney at Bain and then video of candidate Romney on the stump saying, “I know how business works. I know why jobs come and why they go.” As weathered newspaper clips reporting on the plant’s closure flashed across the screen, Soptic provided the voice-over: “They made as much money off it as they could and they closed it down and filed for bankruptcy without any concern for the families or the communities.” Joe Cobb, identified as a steelworker for thirty-one years, delivered a sound bite that was played over and over in the days following. “It was like a vampire,” he said. “They came in and sucked the life out of us.” As the screen filled with images of an abandoned factory site, Soptic said with an air of sadness, “It was like watching an old friend bleed to death.” Romney reappeared on the screen. “As I look around at the millions of Americans without work,” he said, “it breaks my heart.” The ad continued on these themes for another minute, ending with more words from Soptic about Romney: “He’s running for president, and if he’s going to run the country the way he ran our business, I wouldn’t want him there. He would be so out of touch with the average person in this country. How could you care? How could you care for the average working person if you feel this way?”
The two-minute ad marked the opening volley in the long-awaited contest to define Mitt Romney and the beginning of one of the most critical phases of the campaign. The general election had been taking shape for several weeks as Romney scrambled to complete a lengthy to-do list—from repairing some of the damage inflicted by the primary campaign to meeting the urgent need to expand a lean operation into one capable of matching the muscle and sophistication of the incumbent, whose team had spent the prior year preparing for this moment. From one angle, and particularly in retrospect, the battle to define Romney appeared to be a one-sided contest. Obama’s campaign attacked and attacked and attacked, pouring tens of millions of dollars into the battleground states for advertising that scored Romney’s record in business and government—with almost no pushback by the challenger. It was as if the Obama team had caught Romney flat-footed, as if Romney simply forfeited the most crucial definitional period of the election. But the reality was not that simple. Romney’s team was short on funds and therefore limited in its ability to respond. But his advisers were hardly caught by surprise. In fact, his advisers had begun preparing for the moment—and even the specific attacks—as far back as the previous fall. How and why they responded as they did was not just because of an imbalance in resources, although that was a critical factor. Their response also grew out of fundamentally different strategic assumptions about what the campaign ultimately was about and how it would or could be won—assumptions that would be the target of criticism and second-guessing once the campaign ended.
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“We’re going to beat Obama,” Stuart Stevens said. It was April 3, the morning
of the Wisconsin primary, and we were having breakfast at the Marriott Milwaukee West in Waukesha, a Republican stronghold outside of Milwaukee. Stevens, the chief strategist for the Romney campaign, was a charming and sometimes mercurial political strategist who with business partner Russ Schriefer ran one of the leading Republican advertising firms in the country. At one point in the campaign, he was featured on the cover of the New Republic in the likeness of the don in the Dos Equis beer commercials, with the headline “The Most Interesting Man in the World.” Stevens, a Mississippi native, indeed was an interesting man. He was a fitness freak. His office in the Romney headquarters was a cross between a workout room and a pharmacy. It included a ski machine and a bicycle, assorted other fitness gear and clothing, and a desk piled with containers of vitamins and other nutrients. In between campaigns, Stevens was an adventure seeker. He roamed the world, competing in marathon cross-country ski races or bicycle races. He wrote a book, Feeding Frenzy, about a monthlong dash through Europe in which he ate in twenty-nine different restaurants with Michelin stars. He wrote for the television series Northern Exposure. He was part of the advertising team that helped George W. Bush win two elections. In 2008 he started with John McCain and then jumped to Romney. In the 2012 Romney campaign, he wore many hats, including that of chief strategist, chief communicator, ad maker, and chief speechwriter. Too many, as it would become clear, as others on the campaign chafed at the disorganization he sometimes brought to deliberations. He had the ear of the candidate, though they could hardly have been more different. They were the campaign’s examples of left brain versus right brain, seeming opposites in personality and demeanor.