The Romney team and his super PAC allies, some Republicans are already saying, ran a banal series of television ads and allowed their candidate to be defined early on by Obama as an outsourcing plutocrat who wanted to let Detroit go bankrupt. Their pushback seemed feeble for most of the summer and early autumn. And crucially, Romney never seemed to articulate a clear rationale for the presidency.
The campaign's decision to air a misleading ad in Toledo media market about Chrysler moving Jeep production to China during the closing days of the race is also emerging as a prime reason for Romney's loss in the state he needed to win most.
One senior Ohio Republican called the Jeep ad a "desperate" move and said the Romney campaign walked into a "hornet's nest" of negative press coverage. Nick Everhart, a Columbus-based ad maker, blamed the Ohio loss, in part, on the Romney campaign's "poor media buying. But an adviser to one prominent Republican governor who campaigned for Romney said the campaign's problems were more fundamental.
At no point did Romney give people any reason to vote for him, and so they didn't. Democrats keep control of Senate. Romney may never have been the GOP's dream candidate, but even if he were, Republicans would still have been forced to confront another troubling structural problem on Election Day. Democrats showed decisively that their ground game -- the combined effort to find, persuade and turn out voters -- is devastatingly better than anything their rivals have to offer.
In , Republicans tapped the science of microtargeting to redefine campaigns. That is now ancient history. The Romney campaign and the Republican National Committee entered Election Day boasting about the millions of voter contacts -- door knocks and phone calls -- they had made in all the key states.
Volunteers were making the calls using an automated VOIP-system, allowing them to dial registered voters at a rapid clip and punch in basic data about them on each phone's keypad, feeding basic information into the campaign's voter file.
But volunteer callers were met with angry hang-ups and answering machines just as much as actual voters on the other end of the line.
It was a voter contact system that favored quantity over quality. At the same time, the campaign's door-to-door canvassing effort was heavily reliant on fired-up but untrained volunteers. Obama organizers, meanwhile, had been deeply embedded in small towns and big cities for years, focusing their persuasion efforts on person-to-person contact. The more nuanced data they collected, often with handwritten notes attached, were synced nightly with their prized voter database in Chicago.
After the dust had cleared, the GOP field operation, which had derided the Obama operation and gambled on organic Republican enthusiasm to push them over the top, seemed built on a house of cards. Sources involved in the GOP turnout effort admitted they were badly outmatched in the field by an Obama get-out-the-vote operation that lived up to their immense hype -- except, perhaps, in North Carolina, where Romney was able to pull out a win and Republicans swept to power across the state.
Multiple Romney advisers were left agog at the turnout ninjutsu performed by the Obama campaign, both in early voting and on Election Day.
Not only did Obama field marshals get their targeted supporters to the polls, they found new voters and even outperformed their watershed showings in some decisive counties, a remarkable feat in a race that was supposed to see dampened Democratic turnout. In Florida's Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, the Obama campaign outpaced their final tally by almost 6, votes.
In Nevada's vote-rich Clark County, Obama forces scrounged up almost 9, more votes than they did four years ago. Based on recent polling, this is not outside the realm of possibility.
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We'd really appreciate it. Click the AdBlock button on your browser and select Don't run on pages on this domain. Filed Under: New Jersey Politics , new jersey politics. Thanks for signing up! How Do I Whitelist Observer? Below are steps you can take in order to whitelist Observer. Historically, any candidate polling that well among independents wins. But as it turned out, many of those independents were former Republicans who now self-identify as independents.
The state polls weren't oversampling Democrats and undersampling Republicans - there just weren't as many Republicans this time because they were calling themselves independents. Undecided voters. The perception is they always break for the challenger, since people know the incumbent and would have decided already if they were backing him. Romney was counting on that trend to continue.
Instead, exit polls show Mr. Obama won among people who made up their minds on Election Day and in the few days before the election. So maybe Romney, after running for six years, was in the same position as the incumbent. The campaign before the election had expressed confidence in its calculations, and insisted the Obama campaign, with its own confidence and a completely different analysis, was wrong.
In the end, it the other way around. Jan Crawford. Please enter email address to continue. Please enter valid email address to continue.
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