Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (35 page)

Etch A Sketch

O
n the night of April 24, Mitt Romney returned to New Hampshire to mark another turning point in the campaign. Five states held primaries that day, and Romney swept them all with big majorities as he continued to accumulate the delegates needed to secure his nomination. His focus, however, was no longer on his Republican rivals. He had come back to New Hampshire, where he had announced his candidacy the previous June, to signal the unofficial start of his general election campaign. “To the thousands of good and decent Americans I’ve met who want nothing more than a better chance, a fighting chance, to all of you I have a simple message,” he said. “Hold on a little longer. A better America begins tonight.” He called President Obama a failure as president. He recalled the goodwill and high expectations at the time Obama was sworn in and compared that with the mood now. “The last few years have been the best that Barack Obama can do,” he said, “but it’s not the best America can do.” He predicted that Obama’s record meant that the president’s reelection strategy would be nasty and negative. “That kind of campaign may have worked at another place and in a different time, but not here and not now.” With a nod to Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, he added, “It’s still about the economy, and we’re not stupid.”

Romney had weathered a nomination battle lasting far longer than many analysts had assumed four months earlier. From the perspective of his senior team, he was not a surprise winner but an unlikely one nonetheless—moderate Mitt from Massachusetts leading a party whose identity had been stamped by the intransigence of its congressional wing, particularly the militants in the House, whose approval rating was in the low teens. He was not a gaffe-free candidate, but he had demonstrated resilience and the ability to rise to challenges as they appeared. He was clearly the class of the GOP field and had shown skills and perseverance. From another perspective, Romney’s victory was less remarkable. He began the race with sizable advantages: the experience of having run before, a seasoned team, and a financial network that dwarfed anything his rivals could put together. He ran against a weak
field, the weakest in many years. He was battered by the experience, particularly from the endless debates.

As the primaries were winding down, Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s longtime spokesman and one of his closest advisers, suggested that voters would be willing to take a fresh look at the Republican nominee once they began to focus on the choice in November—an altogether rational thought, though it didn’t quite come out that way. Interviewed by CNN, he said there would be a moment when Romney would be able to “hit a reset button” as he turned from the primaries to the general election. “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch,” he said. “You can kind of shake it up and we start all over.” What Fehrnstrom said was sensible yet foolish—sensible because all nominees have the opportunity to reintroduce themselves after their nominations are secured, but foolish because of the doubts he raised about Romney’s true convictions. Within hours, the comment went viral. Was Romney really not the conservative he portrayed himself to be during the nomination campaign? Was he now about to try to remake himself again?

Nomination battles often strengthen the winner, but many take a toll, and the Republican contest surely was proof of that.
Republican pollster Bill McInturff
, who conducted the NBC News/
Wall Street Journal
poll with Democrat Peter Hart, was quoted by those two organizations as saying the nomination battle had had a “corrosive” effect on the party. Romney could not escape the fallout. It was like high school, Stuart Stevens said: “You are who you hang out with.” The more successful he was at fending off his rivals, and the longer he fought to prove his conservative credentials to a skeptical GOP base, the more he was in conflict with the need to turn his attention to wooing the fall electorate.

Romney wasn’t the first recent nominee to start the general election campaign this way. In 1992, Bill Clinton needed a Manhattan Project in the early summer to repair all the damage from the personal scandals that were aired during his nomination campaign. He, of course, went on to win the presidency. But by many measures, Romney appeared to be in worse shape than other previous nominees. Voters still had trouble warming up to him. His wealth was a barrier they could not get past. Voters had trouble relating to him personally, and he had done little to solve that problem. A
Washington Post
/ABC News poll at the time found that he was the only nominee on record to be underwater in his favorability rating at the start of a general election. His image among independent voters was more negative by the spring of 2012 than when the nomination battle began. He had lost ground among women, thanks to his party’s mishandling a fight with the Obama administration over contraception coverage in health care and his pledge to defund Planned Parenthood.
He was not as strong as he needed to be among white working-class voters, a group where President Obama has been consistently weak. He was in serious trouble with Latinos.

Given those realities, did Romney do everything he could have done after the primaries to put himself in a stronger position for the fall campaign? Could he have done more to ameliorate the impact of things he had done to win the nomination? If not a wholesale shift to the center, did he miss opportunities to make himself a more attractive candidate for the fall?

One way to answer those questions is to look at Romney’s weakness among Hispanic voters—the biggest single demographic challenge that faced the Republican Party. By the time he had the nomination in hand, he and his party were facing a huge deficit with the nation’s fastest-growing minority. This was a problem Republicans had been looking at for many years and one that no amount of talk of reaching out had solved. Few Republicans did well attracting Hispanic votes, and survey after survey showed Romney doing far worse than George W. Bush in 2004 and worse than John McCain in 2008. Bush had done well because Texas shared a border with Mexico and he had become used to dealing with immigrant communities—legal and illegal—in his state. Both he and McCain had pushed at one time for comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship, although McCain had backed away from that position during his 2008 campaign and his share of the Latino vote ended up well below Bush’s. Romney had no connection with the Hispanic community, nor did he have a history of supporting any kind of path to citizenship or legal status. His critical mistake was to see the immigration issue as a weapon with which to attack two of his rivals—Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich—rather than something that demanded a different tone and a more deft handling to prevent his ending up in a deep hole for the general election. The policies he attacked seemed humane—Perry’s support for in-state tuition for students who were Texas residents and were the children of illegal immigrants; Gingrich’s assertion that illegal immigrants who had been in the country a quarter century or more and had established roots in a community should be allowed to stay and gain legal status. Romney’s call for self-deportation compounded his problems.

After the election was over, Matt Rhoades was one of the first among Romney’s top advisers to publicly express regret at how aggressively the campaign had used immigration (and by implication how far to the right it had pushed Romney) in the primaries. At the quadrennial conference of campaign managers hosted by Harvard’s Institute of Politics in November 2012, Rhoades acknowledged the hazard of using immigration the way they did. When I talked to him about it later, he said the decision to attack Perry was a strategic choice made in the heat of battle at a time when the Texas governor appeared to be a serious
threat. He later concluded that the campaign’s attacks on Perry’s stance on Social Security would have been enough to defeat him. “I feel that we could have beat Rick Perry just with the Social Security hit,” he said, “because he just could never really answer his own Social Security position. But hindsight is twenty-twenty. The strategic decision was we have to beat Rick Perry.” Self-deportation was neither a strategic nor a tactical decision. It was simply a blunder by the candidate, a verbal ad lib in the middle of a debate. Romney advisers still believed the policy he was describing was fair and unobjectionable, if only he had said it differently. A more benign way of saying it, one adviser later said, would have been “attrition through enforcement.”

Two other questions flowed out of the decision to attack Perry and Gingrich on immigration. One was whether there was real debate about the potential consequences of the strategy. When I asked one official, he said, “It obviously wasn’t enough. I think this was one of those times where we were very good at tactics, and this was a tactical play that was very obvious, right.” Given that it came with such an obvious risk, why wasn’t there more debate? “The pull was too strong,” he said. “It was too alluring [as] a successful tactic . . . in the confines of the primary. It was too irresistible.” Lanhee Chen said, “Anytime you discuss immigration, you always run the risk of creating a wedge issue for a general election. But we ultimately felt like it was an important discussion to have, and it was a politically timely discussion to have, given the primary we were in. So we made a decision to go for it.”

There was another reason Romney took the positions he did on immigration. They were consistent with where he had stood before. He had attacked Rudy Giuliani on immigration, charging that New York City was one of the nation’s leading sanctuary cities when Giuliani was mayor. He had vetoed a bill similar to the one Perry had signed. If he suddenly reversed course in 2012 by giving Perry a pass on the in-state tuition plan or by giving ground on the question of providing a path to citizenship or legal status, he would have opened himself up to new criticism that he was a flip-flopper. The campaign was always sensitive about not allowing that to become a line of attack by any of his rivals—Republican or Democrat.

The other question is why the campaign did not do more to clean up this problem once they were making the pivot to the general election. Romney had an early opportunity to soften his image on immigration when Florida senator Marco Rubio began to float the idea of finding a compromise on the Dream Act, legislation designed to give young people who had been brought to the United States illegally as children and were graduating from high school a chance to stay in the country and eventually to seek legal status. By completing two years of military service or two years of college they could obtain residency
for six years. The measure enjoyed bipartisan support when it was first introduced, but over time Republicans peeled off. Romney had always opposed it.

Rubio said that his idea would not go as far as the one Obama and the Democrats favored but that he hoped it would go far enough to win bipartisan support. Rubio’s efforts seemed to offer Romney a lifeline on immigration, something that he could get behind to show that. Instead the campaign kept Rubio at arm’s length, at least publicly. “Privately we were very much encouraged by what Marco was doing,” Chen said. “I think part of the challenge is that they were working through some specifics, and until we saw some of those specifics, we weren’t going to sign on hook, line, and sinker.” Fehrnstrom said the campaign saw Rubio’s efforts as potentially helpful. “We were curious about it and wondering if there would be any kind of political cover that he could provide the governor by bringing forward his own plan,” he said. “But it was always very nebulous to us. We never saw anything concrete.” That conservatives were beginning to raise doubts about Rubio’s efforts also gave the campaign pause.

Rubio’s efforts were cut short when Obama announced in June that he would act by executive order to stop deportations of young people who had been brought to the country as children of illegal immigrants. Romney’s team recognized it as shrewd politics that put the governor in a box. He stumbled in response, denouncing the process that produced the policy—without the consent of Congress—but refusing to say whether he supported the policy itself. To oppose it outright would have been hugely damaging politically. To support it would have meant turning his back on his long-standing position that you should not reward lawbreaking. “What we tried to do was to talk about process, talk about the importance of a permanent solution, talk about the fact that what the president had done had chilled the effort of Marco Rubio and others that would have been potentially more lasting,” Chen said. “But that was what we were going to be confined to. We were going to be confined to talking about process rather than substance.”

Fehrnstrom said the campaign ultimately believed the best way to deal with Romney’s lack of support among Hispanics was to find a better way to talk about legal immigration and the impact of Obama’s economic policies on the Hispanic community. The team debated whether Romney should come forward with an immigration plan of his own. Romney’s inclination was to do so. He believed he had ideas worthy of airing in the election. But the consensus was that it would be a mistake to reopen the debate about immigration policy. Romney would be at a disadvantage no matter what he proposed. Obama’s Dream Act decision also short-circuited that discussion. When Romney addressed the National Association of Latino Elected Officials shortly after
Obama issued the order, he talked mostly about strengthening legal immigration but offered no new ideas for dealing with illegals. “We thought if we could somehow focus the discussion about illegal immigration on those who were playing by the rules and how unfair the illegal immigration system was to them, that we could form that connection once again with the Hispanic voter,” Fehrnstrom said.

Another option was to launch a more aggressive ad campaign targeted at Hispanics. Ed Gillespie, who was brought in after the primaries to help oversee communications and message strategy, pushed hard for spending money on Spanish-language advertising. Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman and counselor to President George W. Bush, was sensitive to the party’s overall problems with Latinos and wanted the campaign to take on the issue more directly. By then, the decision not to offer new policies had been made. “We focused less on taking other positions and more on how we get on the air with Hispanic voters,” one campaign official said. “And we were never able to force that until when Ed joined the team. He was a consistent and strong voice and strong advocate for making an appeal to Hispanic voters.” It wasn’t until near the end of the campaign that Romney began running Spanish-language ads. But another adviser was fatalistic. The campaign wasn’t going to solve Romney’s or the party’s problem with a flight of TV ads. On that point, he was correct. The Republican Party’s deficiencies with Hispanic voters were years in the making, and extended beyond the issue of immigration. Republicans long assumed that their conservative and family values meshed well with the values of the Hispanic community, but never worked consistently or effectively to appeal to Latino voters. Certainly immigration was a major problem. After then California governor Pete Wilson backed Proposition 187, an anti–illegal immigration ballot initiative, during his 1994 reelection campaign, the Latino share of the state’s electorate jumped dramatically—and turned even more against the Republicans. But Republicans were on the wrong side of other issues important to the Hispanic community. In 2012, the Obama campaign focused its Spanish-language ads on the president’s Affordable Care Act, not immigration.