Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America

by Balz, Dan

  In the final weeks of the campaign, the disparity in polls became a point of contention between the Obama and Romney campaigns because of competing assumptions about the shape and composition of the likely electorate on election day. Only in 2004 had the percentage of self-identified Republicans equaled the percentage of self-identified Democrats on election day. In all other years, Democrats had outnumbered Republicans. But Republicans were certain that the electorate in 2012 would not be anything like 2008. Romney’s advisers believed that, at worst, Democrats would outnumber Republicans by two to three points. Obama officials were baffled by the reports coming from the Romney campaign of surging momentum and polls continuing to shift and sought to assure reporters they were not spinning their own numbers. Axelrod thought Romney’s team was foolish to put its credibility on the line based on faulty data. If he had any doubts about the outcome, he told me in the last days of the campaign, he would find a way to hedge his language about Obama’s prospects of winning. Instead he was more than bullish and ready to stand behind his campaign’s numbers. “Everybody’s entitled to their own interpretation of whatever they’re looking at,” he said, “but I wouldn’t trade places with them for anything.”

  For good reason: Romney’s polls were more optimistic than Obama’s but hardly made the election look in the bag. Neil Newhouse said the campaign’s last Ohio poll showed Romney down two points. In Virginia, the last track showed Romney up one, while a separate survey based on internal calls by the campaign showed Romney a point down. In Florida, Romney was up two in the final track and ahead in the second measure. Colorado looked better, with Romney up three in one measure and plus one in the second. The campaign had conflicting data on New Hampshire and had Romney trailing in other states. Beeson and Newhouse estimated that the polling alone put Romney’s chances at one in four or a little better, but they were counting on the enthusiasm they were seeing in their polls and in Romney’s crowds to give them an added boost. “We thought that voter intensity would put us over the top,” Newhouse said.

  • • •

  The “October surprise” is part of the lexicon of presidential politics, the notion that in the final weeks of the campaign something could happen—a terrorist attack or a dramatic revelation about a candidate—to change the trajectory of the race. No one expected what happened in October 2012. On October 29, eight days before the election, Hurricane Sandy slammed into the East Coast, causing widespread damage and devastation. New Jersey, New York, and parts of Connecticut bore the brunt of the storm’s fury. More than a hundred people lost their lives during the storm, millions were left without power, lower Manhattan was flooded, and sections of the Jersey shore were wiped out. The hurricane brought the campaigns to a halt. Obama cut short a political trip and returned to Washington to monitor the storm. On October 31, he flew to New Jersey, where he surveyed the damage accompanied by Chris Christie. The New Jersey governor offered unbridled praise for the president that week, piling one superlative on another in television interviews or standing at Obama’s side. Obama had been “outstanding,” he said. Coordination had been “wonderful.” He talked about how often he and the president had been on the phone during the storm and immediately after. “I cannot thank the president enough for his personal concern and compassion,” he said at a press conference with Obama. Republicans winced as Christie continued to heap praise on the man he had so often accused of lack of leadership. He told Fox News at one point, “If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics, then you don’t know me.”

  The storm effectively grounded Romney. As Obama went about his business—being presidential and drawing accolades from all sides—Romney was forced to the sidelines. His advisers could only watch helplessly as Obama soaked up positive coverage carrying out his official duties. Romney and Christie had spoken on the Sunday night before the storm hit. Christie was scheduled to campaign that week but told Romney he wasn’t sure whether he would be able to do so. Romney told him to do what his state needed. Later there were reports that the Romney campaign wanted Christie to do one big rally with the Republican nominee on the final weekend. There had been no formal invitation, but when the rumors started, one of Christie’s advisers was told to call a senior member of the Romney team with a message: Don’t invite Christie to campaign with Romney because he will have to say no.

  Some Romney advisers later pointed to Sandy as the moment the campaign was lost. They argued that the storm stalled their momentum and kept them from driving home their message in the crucial last week of the campaign while putting the president in the best possible light. They pointed to exit polls as evidence that the storm badly hurt Romney. Fifteen percent of voters cited the hurricane as the most important factor in their vote—and they backed the president by 73 to 26 percent. But those exit polls also showed that 78 percent of all voters said they had made up their minds before October—before the hurricane and before the debates. Obama won those early deciders by 52 to 47 percent. Of those who said they made up their minds in October or in the last few days of the campaign, Romney would have had to win almost 65 percent of them to claim an overall majority. There was no question that Obama’s ratings rose in the wake of the storm, but available evidence suggests that by the time it hit, the election was largely decided. Sandy did not defeat Mitt Romney.

  • • •

  The election turned out almost precisely the way the team in Chicago had predicted—and the way many of the public polls of the overall national vote and in the battleground states were predicting as well. The president won the popular vote by 51 to 47 percent, a smaller margin than in 2008 but bigger than many had been predicting until the final week. He got 65.9 million votes to Romney’s 60.9 million. The total vote of 129.1 million, which included other candidates on the ballots, was down slightly from the 131.3 million people who turned out in 2008. The raw vote totals declined in the non–swing states but rose slightly in the battlegrounds, according to calculations by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report and National Journal, which may have reflected the money, advertising, candidate time, and mobilization efforts in those states compared with elsewhere. In the Electoral College, Obama won by a landslide. He carried twenty-six states plus the District of Columbia for 332 electoral votes. Romney won twenty-four states and 206 electoral votes. Obama’s total was down from 365 electoral votes in 2008 but again was higher than many had been predicting. All the hot air and spilled ink about a razor-thin outcome and a late night of counting was for nothing.

  Obama nearly swept the battleground states, to the great surprise of the Romney campaign. Of the nine states that had switched from Republican to Democrat in 2008, only two reverted to the Republican column: Indiana and North Carolina. The Obama campaign had conceded Indiana from the start, but fought to hold North Carolina. In the end, Romney carried it by two points, 50 to 48 percent. Of the most contested of the battleground states—Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Colorado—Romney’s share fell well below what his team had expected.

  Obama won Ohio by 51 to 48 percent, almost matching his national numbers. Exit polls showed that African Americans composed 15 percent of the Ohio electorate in 2012, compared to 11 percent in 2008. An analysis of Ohio voting statistics by Mike Dawson, an Ohio voting expert, found no surge at all in the actual number of African American votes cast. Certainly strong support from African Americans and young voters was crucial to Obama’s victory in Ohio, but he also was aided by the fact that Romney did worse among white working-class voters than he should have. Nationally, Obama won 36 percent of whites without college degrees. In Ohio he captured 42 percent of those voters. Romney was hurt by a decline in turnout among white voters, whose participation rate lagged blacks’, according to a Census Bureau report. That too hurt Romney. It lends credence to the idea that the auto bailout and Romney’s image helped the president with that constituency and suggests that the attacks during the summer did more damage than some of the pollin
g at the time indicated. Romney won independents in Ohio, which was always the campaign’s top priority, and yet lost the state. “Romney actually had some success in the battle for voters who were open to being persuaded,” Scott Jennings, the campaign’s Ohio director, said. “Where Obama really hurts us was by turning out base voters where persuasion wasn’t the issue. . . . Now we know which strategy gets more votes.”

  Obama won Florida by a point, 50 to 49 percent, with a margin of about seventy-four thousand out of a total of 8.4 million votes cast. He captured this biggest of the battleground states by winning the Hispanic vote, including the Cuban American vote, which long had been part of the Republican base in the state but was trending blue. Exit polls showed that the Hispanic share of the vote in Florida jumped from 14 to 17 percent. Obama’s margin among those voters was twenty-one points, compared with just fifteen points four years earlier. Obama lost the white vote in Florida by twenty-four points, compared with fourteen points in 2008. The swelling Hispanic population and Obama’s ability to attract a larger share of it were enough to offset his decline among whites. Virginia was another must-win for Romney, but Obama took it by 51 to 47 percent. Colorado turned out not to be very close at all. The president won it by 52 to 46 percent. The share of the Latino vote rose only a percentage point between 2008 and 2012, but Obama’s margin among those voters leaped from twenty-three to fifty-two points, a reminder of the crippling Republican deficit among the nation’s fastest-growing minority group.

  Obama won New Hampshire and Iowa by six points. He carried Wisconsin and Nevada by seven points. Nevada was never likely to go for Romney. By one estimate, the minority share of eligible voters jumped by nine percentage points between 2008 and 2012 and accounted for 40 percent of all eligible voters in the state. Those demographic changes sealed off the state from Romney’s appeals. Obama’s margins were down everywhere, but that was little consolation to Romney. Beyond the principal battlegrounds, Republican efforts to put Pennsylvania into play came up short. Obama won there by five points, although his margin was just half as large as it had been four years earlier. Michigan turned its back on native son Romney and showed its continuing allegiance to the Democrats. Obama won there by almost ten points. Minnesota, another state where Republicans had run some ads, went for Obama by eight points. Nothing changed the overall pattern of the vote from 2008.

  Party loyalty was stronger than in any election since exit polls began, with more than 90 percent of Republicans and Democrats supporting their nominee. More than 90 percent of Obama’s and Romney’s voters also backed the candidate from the same party in Senate elections. The election highlighted the deep geographical divisions as well—the preponderance of deeply red and deeply blue states and counties. Even fewer counties shifted in 2012 than in 2008—a total of 207 compared with 382, according to data compiled by the Post’s Ted Mellnik. Of those 207 that changed, 198 moved from Democratic to Republican. That represented about 7 percent of all counties that shifted, the lowest in a hundred years, according to Bill Bishop. The historical average had been almost 25 percent of counties switching parties from one election to the next. Despite the relative closeness of the national popular vote, only four states were decided by a margin of less than five points. Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, pointed out that close elections of the past had a very different pattern. In 1960, the margin between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon was five points or fewer in twenty states, which included the three most populous: New York, California, and Texas. In 2012, the winner of each of the three states won by a landslide—California and New York to Obama and Texas to Romney.

  Obama won reelection despite winning just 39 percent of the white vote and recording the worst margin among whites of any successful Democrat. He offset that by winning 80 percent of the votes of nonwhites. Mitt Romney got almost nine of every ten of his votes from white voters, an untenable position for a party that seeks to lead the nation whose minority population is steadily growing. Among Hispanics, Romney got just 27 percent. That was less than John McCain’s 31 percent in 2008. Even as most demographic groups voted slightly more Republican in 2012, Latinos went the other way. The shift toward a more nonwhite electorate continued, as Obama’s political team had predicted. On election day 2012, whites made up just 72 percent of the electorate, and this evolution will continue into the future.

  When Romney and his strategists looked at the exit polls, they found evidence to claim that he had won the economic argument. After all, they said, he won a majority of those who said the economy was the biggest issue in the election, and that bloc of voters accounted for almost 60 percent of the electorate. And just over half the country said they agreed that government was trying to do too much, as he had preached throughout the campaign. But running counter was other, stronger evidence of why he fell short. A majority of voters still blamed George W. Bush for the economic mess, and only 38 percent blamed Obama. Beyond that, Romney won by just a single percentage point on the question of who would better handle the economy. The challenger needed a much bigger margin on that question to oust an incumbent president, even in difficult economic times. Most telling was the question about which candidate was more in touch with “people like you.” Fifty-three percent cited Obama and only 43 percent Romney. A majority said Romney’s policies would favor the rich. Voters may have seen Romney as a successful businessman, but Obama’s middle-class message had gotten through to people in ways Romney’s had not. As Kevin Madden put it after the campaign, “We were teaching an economics class, they were writing love songs.”

  • • •

  Mitt Romney spent election night with his family in a suite at the Westin Hotel in Boston. Confidence was so high heading into election day that Romney had not taken the precaution of writing a concession speech in advance. He had made a few stabs at it, but it would not come together. “I can’t write it,” he told someone close to him. “It doesn’t seem right.” Paul Ryan was, if anything, more confident. As he was preparing to fly to Boston in the late afternoon of election day, he was openly talking about resigning his chairmanship of the House Budget Committee immediately after the election and was already thinking of possible replacements to head the committee during the budget fight coming in the lame-duck session. By evening, however, Romney and those around him knew that the odds of winning looked much longer than they had at the start of the day. The early exit polls and the campaign’s soundings from some of the battleground states painted a picture far different from their internal models and polls in the final days.

  During election day, a technological breakdown hit the Romney campaign. The technology team had built software that was supposed to provide near-instantaneous reports on who had voted and who hadn’t, invaluable information to assist in getting out every Romney voter possible. But the system, called ORCA, had never been fully tested—“We were building the aircraft as we were taking off from the carrier,” Rich Beeson said later—and when thousands of volunteers began trying to file their reports, the system crashed. Some angry volunteers began tweeting out their dissatisfaction, and for a few days there was a story line developing that it was ORCA’s crash that helped lose the election for Romney. It may have been one more embarrassment for a campaign that was judged to be leagues behind the Obama campaign in its technological prowess, but it was hardly the catastrophe described. A smoothly running ORCA would not have made Romney president.*

  The Romney team monitored the vote count from a boiler room at the TD Garden in Boston, with other senior staffers in a suite at the Westin. Beeson had seen voting patterns during the day that worried him. Turnout in Philadelphia was huge, a sign of enthusiasm in the African American community. In Miami-Dade, an Obama stronghold in Florida, Democratic turnout also looked strong. The campaign had prepared for the possibility of recounts. Staffers had been given assignments and had packed and deposited their luggage, ready to depart in the middle of the night if necessary.
As the evening went on, it became clear those contingencies weren’t likely to be activated. Romney began to write his concession.

  In Chicago, the Obama team operated from its boiler room in the Prudential Building while Obama was with his family and some close friends at the nearby Fairmont Hotel. In the early evening, Obama talked with Plouffe, who told him things looked good. “Can I talk to the First Lady?” Obama asked. Plouffe said not yet, but soon. He wanted to see more definitive results before telling the president that he could pass the good news along. Shortly thereafter, the president spoke to Messina. “I said, ‘Mr. President, I have bad news for you,’ and he goes, ‘You do?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I think you’re going to have to put up with those assholes in Congress for four more years.’ He laughed and I said, ‘But look, exits are exits, they’ve always been wrong, they told Al Gore he was going to be president.’ I said, ‘The model says our people turned out, and I said that’s all we cared about, and I said to you, if our people turn out you’re going to win, so if I tell you something different now you should think I’m crazy.’”

  New Hampshire and Iowa were called for Obama relatively quickly in the evening, but for several hours, the big four—Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Colorado—were all considered too close to call by the networks. Then at 11:12 p.m., NBC called Ohio for Obama and projected him as the winner of the election. Other networks quickly followed, including Fox News. At Romney headquarters and on the Fox News set, there were dissenting voices. Karl Rove, the architect of Bush’s two victories, was working as a Fox News analyst. “I think it’s premature,” he said. His comments prompted Fox anchor Megyn Kelly to double-check with the network’s decision desk, which stood behind its call. Obama was in his hotel suite watching the television screen as the race was being called. He was standing with Valerie Jarrett and her daughter and son-in-law. Jarrett was gesturing enthusiastically at the screen. “You’ve won!” she exclaimed. Obama stood impassively, arms folded across his chest. Jarrett said, “He said, ‘Let’s wait and see what everybody else says.’ Then when Fox called it he was like, ‘Okay, I guess I probably won.’” Messina, Plouffe, and Axelrod quickly hiked over to the hotel. Plouffe, ever mindful that this was the proudest moment for a campaign manager, signaled that Messina should talk to Obama alone first. Then Axelrod, Plouffe, and Robert Gibbs—the original trio from 2008—joined them for a round of photographs.