Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (36 page)

So Romney was carrying his own and his party’s baggage with Hispanics as he moved from the primaries to the general election. His own research told his team just how bad the situation was. “For a lot of these Hispanic voters, the first thing that came up was ‘Romney’s wealthy,’” said one senior adviser. “It wasn’t the immigration stuff, it was his wealth, the sense that he’s out of touch. And then beyond that, it was the health care plan. They loved Obamacare.” The campaign could find no solution to these problems.

•   •   •

The primary campaign inflicted other damage. Romney’s credibility on taxes and deficits was compromised by decisions made as he was fending off his more conservative rivals. In September 2011, he had issued his initial plan for the economy, which drew a tepid response from conservatives. The
Wall Street Journal
editorial page offered this underwhelmed reaction: “
The 160 pages and 59 proposals
also strike us as surprisingly timid and tactical considering our economic predicament. They’re a technocrat’s guide more than a reform manifesto.” The plan did not flesh out his proposals for cutting taxes or reforming the tax code. The feeling among his advisers was that to start down that path would inevitably lead to a bidding war with the other candidates. Herman Cain had his “9-9-9” plan. Gingrich had his call for a zero capital gains tax rate. Santorum had his proposals to give manufacturers a bigger break than others. “We’re just going to get into a shouting match,” an adviser said. Romney, for example, was not willing to take the capital gains tax down to zero. He thought it was bad policy and he recognized that it was bad politics for him, given his wealth and earnings, even if conservatives loved it.

As other candidates offered their plans and as Santorum began to rise as a serious challenger, conservative commentators hammered Romney for not being bold enough. He responded by proposing the 20 percent reduction in income tax rates a week before the Michigan and Arizona primaries. “I think there were certainly some economic conservatives that thought pretty strongly that we need a more forceful articulation of a tax reform proposal,” one adviser said. “But there was also a sense beyond what everyone else may have been saying that if we were going to be the candidate of the economy and of improving the economy, it was going to be hard to advance that discussion much further without fleshing out the tax discussion. . . . We made the risk-reward assessment at the time.”

By some independent analyses, based on their interpretation of the plan, Romney was calling for $5 trillion in new tax cuts, most of it going to the wealthiest Americans. He said he would offset the cuts, particularly for the rich, by eliminating deductions. But he declined to spell out which ones. Once through the primaries, Romney faced continued criticism from Obama and the Democrats that his plan did not add up. Either he didn’t have answers to how he would offset the tax cuts or he didn’t want to reveal them because they might be politically unpalatable. Lanhee Chen said Romney discussed the conundrum with his economic advisers. Their conclusion was that once he moved off talking about the broad principles of his plan, he was begging for trouble. Even if a single detail came out they would be forced into a cascade of specificity. “We made the decision to articulate the principles and talk about the need
for tax reform and our belief that reform was a part of growth, as opposed to getting into a specific discussion,” he said. He added that the campaign eventually produced a fully developed tax reform plan, one that he said when dynamically scored met all the requirements Romney had set out—to retain progressivity, to make sure that the top 6 percent of earners continued to pay what they do now under the new system, and to cut tax rates by 20 percent. “We had all of those features in a plan,” Chen said. “But we felt like talking about it in details was going to be a challenge for us to sustain. In all truth, it was a pretty darn good plan.” He added, “There was no way Mitt was going to let taxes go up on the middle class. It just wasn’t going to happen. I can say that in all honesty. It’s not just a political statement. He wasn’t—he just didn’t believe that was the right thing to do.”

With scripted silence, Romney remained on the defensive on taxes.

•   •   •

Romney’s vanquished rivals eventually offered their praise for the political savvy he and his campaign had shown in winning the nomination. His competitors acknowledged that they had underestimated his dogged determination and his competitiveness. One rival came away impressed that Romney had grasped earlier than any of the other candidates how much the world had changed. “Mitt did something very smart before everybody else,” this person said. “He saw the super PAC future. He had the network to fund it, he funded it early, and Santorum and Gingrich kind of got the joke later, but it was too late and too little. Mitt only in his highest-water mark had 30 percent of the market—70 percent of the market share was for somebody else. So if somebody could have successfully kept pace with him for a while, while the 70 percent aggregated and had their resources to endure that, I think he could have toppled them. But that requires an early super PAC, not dollar-for-dollar money but at least proportionate money with Mitt. . . . His lesson from ’08 was he let Huckabee out, survived too long, should have pummeled him early, and that super PAC just pummeled anybody who got in the way. For all of the bemoaning about how he won, the so-called power brokers weren’t able to coalesce around anybody early.”

Newt Gingrich, too, came to a grudging respect for the campaign Romney waged to win the nomination. Even before he quit the race, he was reassessing Romney as an opponent. “Romney’s proven a couple of things,” he told me shortly before the Wisconsin primary. “He’s tougher than I thought he was, which is good, and he’ll become president. He is a very good arouser of resources. I mean, I’m beginning to think he may actually be able to match Obama’s resources, which would be extraordinary.” In that same conversation over breakfast in Milwaukee, he said, “I also had to realize, if ruthlessly
relentlessly negative is necessary to beat Obama, he may be the better nominee. I mean, he may just have both the resources and the toughness and the willingness to say and do anything. That may be the only way you beat Obama.” Three months later, as we reviewed events after the nomination battle had ended, he offered an additional insight into both Romney and the Republican Party electorate. I recalled that in February he had confidently predicted that the party would never nominate Romney. “I was wrong,” he said. “The party was desperately looking for the person who could beat Obama, so the number one criteria wasn’t, are you conservative enough? [It was] can you beat Obama?” He said he learned this during his attack on Bain. The ideology fight was being overwhelmed by the Obama fight. Almost overnight the Bain issue was defined as an attack on free enterprise. “Now, part of that was Romney being clever,” he said, “but part of it’s guys like Limbaugh, who are not particularly moved by Romney but they were responding to, ‘My God, how could you sound like Obama?’”

•   •   •

Romney’s campaign had other pressing needs coming out of the primaries. It was nearly broke and leagues behind Obama in building a campaign capable of waging the general election. “We had to expand our finance team, digital and political teams,” Rhoades said. “Obviously we knew [the Obama campaign was] spending a lot of money on something in 2011 and it wasn’t TV commercials at that point. We believed that they were building out an incredible ground floor, so we needed to build out our political teams in new states.” Obama’s team had a head start of more than twelve months—some would say four years. Rhoades had kept the Romney operation lean through the primaries but now had to expand exponentially overnight. He asked his department heads in the spring to draw up plans for expansion. Zac Moffatt, who ran the digital side of the campaign, told Rhoades he needed his staff to grow from 14 to 110 in fifty days. Moffatt played catch-up through the rest of the campaign. Romney had set up field operations as the primary and caucus calendar dictated, but once those events were over, they often shuttered their offices and moved on to the next contest. Rich Beeson’s political department, with help from the Republican National Committee, had to put in place state-by-state units to turn out the vote. Gail Gitcho’s communications shop needed more help quickly. Most pressing of all was the need to raise money. Romney had spent $91 million in winning the nomination, but his war chest was now almost empty. Money had been pouring in since April, but most of that could be used only for the general election, and that didn’t start, by the rules of the Federal Election Commission, until Romney formally accepted the nomination in Tampa at the end of August. Spencer Zwick put together an ambitious fund-raising plan and it was working, but finding new
people who hadn’t already given to Romney for the primaries was one of the biggest challenges the campaign faced. He had swamped his Republican rivals with superior financial resources but now was desperately short of money to wage a campaign against the president during the summer months.

•   •   •

One other problem remained unaddressed as the general election campaign began. Voters still didn’t particularly like Romney. After running for president almost continuously since 2006, Romney had yet to fully define himself—and to the extent he had, it was as a wealthy patrician who was unapproachable to the average voter. These voters recognized certain attributes—a man of values, a man of faith, a man devoted to his family, a record of success in business—but they still found him buttoned-up, distant, and unimaginably wealthy. Even Romney’s research was telling the campaign that. As one focus group participant said, “He’s been too rich for too long.”

THE CHOICE

The New America

P
residential elections are often retold from the inside out, as if all power and wisdom flow from the strategists plotting and arguing inside their secured headquarters. But the story is often better told from the outside in, as a way of highlighting how so much that happens in American politics is determined by larger forces that campaign strategists can change only at the margins. This was certainly the case in 2012. For all the drama of any moment, for all the exaggerated attention given to one daily controversy or another, for all the praise heaped on the winners and the second-guessing of the losers, for all the elements that make political campaigns compelling, entertaining, exasperating, and sometimes just plain weird, elections play out against the reality of an ever-changing country that powerfully directs the action.

The economy was one driving force, as it always is in presidential campaigns. But two others came into play as well in 2012. One was the power of demographic change that continued to alter the face of America and the fortunes of the two political parties, irrespective of the candidates. This has long been part of the political landscape, but never quite so clearly as in the first decade of the twenty-first century when a rising Hispanic population and the aging of the baby boom generation brought new issues and a potent new voice to the table. The other factor controlling the election was relatively newer but no less significant. Political polarization, once thought confined to the elites, was a pervasive factor in shaping the political behavior of voters everywhere.

Americans were still in a gloomy mood as the fall election approached, beaten down by the effects of the economic collapse in the fall of 2008 and frustrated with three years of dysfunctional government in Washington. The recession had hit with overpowering force, pushing the unemployment rate above 10 percent for the first time in almost three decades. The collapse forced many families into foreclosure on their homes. Many others discovered that their homes were worth far less than the mortgages they owed on them. They were frozen economically. Retirement accounts shrank by 30 or 40 percent. Most studies had shown that Obama’s stimulus package had prevented an even
worse collapse, yet the economy was anything but sound. Unemployment had started to tick down from its peak, but in May 2012 it was still 8.2 percent and had been above 8 percent for forty consecutive months. Every poll indicated that voters cared most about one issue: jobs. Nothing else came close to the economy as the greatest concern on the minds of the electorate. No president since Franklin Roosevelt during the Depression had faced reelection with unemployment so high, though there were few examples from which to draw any firm conclusions. Reagan flirted with rates that high when he was reelected, but economic growth was roaring at a pace far beyond that of Obama’s economy. There would be no “morning in America” in the president’s campaign ads in 2012.

Long-term unemployment had reached epidemic proportions. Forty percent of the unemployed—almost six million total—had been out of work for six months or longer, in danger of becoming part of a permanent class of workers who would become unemployable as their skills failed to keep pace with the changing needs of the economy. Unemployed workers were moving back into the workforce at the slowest pace since the late 1940s.
The
Economist
magazine
noted that for the first time in decades, unemployed workers were more likely to drop out of the workforce than to find a new job.

Pollster Peter Hart felt the force of this gloom and pessimism when he organized the first in a series of election-year focus groups for the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He began the project, which would run throughout the entire election cycle, in the fall of 2011 with a group of twelve people from the Cincinnati area. Eight had supported Obama in 2008, and the other four had voted for John McCain. When Hart first went around the table and asked people to describe the state of the country, he heard a litany of frustration:

“Disappointing,” the first woman said.

“Stagnant,” said another woman.

A third woman said, “Going poorly.”

In rapid-fire order, the others concurred:

“Contentious.”

“Outlook is grim.”

“Challenging.”

“Running in place.”

Why were they so downbeat? The general manager at a family-owned garden center responded, “Unemployment, no job creation, the amount of money of the national debt. It’s just, everything’s compounded.” A man who worked in the investment business pointed to a more fundamental problem. “I feel like that the whole system is flawed, and the fact that, when I say that, I mean that
I feel like that the politicians sometimes aren’t really the ones. They’re just the mouthpiece. But the people behind their campaign, the people who are contributing to their campaign, are actually the people who are running the country. Whether you call that good or bad or right or left, I think that fundamental problem with our government is what’s put us in this place that we’re in right now.” He said America was running in place and seemed destined to stay there until the next election, maybe longer. A woman who worked in retail sales added, “I think the whole contentiousness that we’ve mentioned several times is building and building and building, and it’s almost to a point now where people just really don’t know if they can trust anyone in politics.”

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.

•   •   •

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.

•   •   •

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.