Turnout OBAMA McCain/Romney
2012 59.0% 60,840,934 57,940,881
Since President Obama’s re-election on Tuesday, I’ve been
mindful that analysis paralysis may soon set in, so here’s my two-cent epiphany:
Republicans lost big.
Rather than analyze Gov. Romney’s flip-flops, editorial missteps
and inopportune remarks, or blame the rising tide of minority demographics, or even
guess “what were people thinking???” we turn to the Obama playbook:
Give individual voters (not groups!) exactly what they want,
remind them who gave it to them, and make them say “Thank you, Barack” on
Election Day.
The Obama strategy isn’t new, really more like winning a
high school student body election on a massive scale. The issues were “small,” as pundits like to
say, but to each voter who got a small gift from the arguably failed President,
each was just enough reason to win each vote.
The fancy term for it became known as “micro-targeting.” To the frustrated GOP, it was simple “pay for
play.”
They don’t call politics the “second oldest profession” for
nothing, now do they? The difference in
2012 was the Obama campaign went retail.
It’s one thing to promise groups what they want and hope members of the
group will show up and vote. The Obama
campaign went directly to the individual consumers of government largess, who
benefited directly from its positions and policies (e.g., college loan
recipients, food stamp recipients) and demanded their individual gratitude, as
distinct from a "group" endorsement or financial support.
Republicans are no slouches when it comes to making promises
and running up debt, mind you, but comparatively they have nothing to show for
it. The Obama campaign mastered the art
of demanding thanks for its gestures while Republicans talked in the abstract
about runaway government and taking the goodies away. Through massive direct individual contact, the
Obama campaign worked at making sure every recipient, no matter how small the
gift was, got ushered to cast their ballot.
In hindsight, it’s a miracle the election was even close.
Now, you ask, why can’t Republicans do the same? Lowering people’s taxes would seem to be just
the kind of direct benefit that would win votes, right? All Republicans need to do to win is contact
individuals whose taxes were cut by the Republican Congress and get them to
show up, right?
Sadly that’s not enough.
Apart from the repulsion most conservatives feel from selling government
goodies for votes, the real take-away from the Obama victory was that the
President and his supporters knew they had lost the election. They knew that the President’s policies had
failed, his ideas were rotten, and large numbers of people (over eight million!!) who voted for him in
2008 were not going to do so again.
Their solution was to harvest replacement voters. That is, for each person who abandoned the
Obama camp between 2008 and today, a new voter needed to be plucked from the
sea of recipients. And it was this systematic
replacement of lost support proved to be the recipe for Obama’s electoral success.
That the considerably better-run, better-funded Romney 2012 campaign
fell about two million votes short of John McCain’s 2008 turnout, proves my
point. Republicans were flying “blind,”
it seems, unaware of how many voters it had to “replace” from 2008. The only explanation I can think of for not
doing so is Republicans banked too much on the idea that Obama was a failure,
and refused to look at how its own voters saw the Republican nominee.
In short, unlike Obama’s strategists who knew they were
falling short, the Republicans didn’t actually think they could be in trouble
with voters until it was too late.
Between now and the next elections in 2014, the GOP has a
lot of work to do. Most of the
discussion has been on wholesale marketing to make Republicans more acceptable
to minorities, or to double-down on the hot-button social issues. If 2012 proved anything, it’s that all
politics is retail. Where the GOP stumbled
was by not bringing its proposals home, that is, into people’s homes. Standing out on the street and screaming “stop
federal spending” and other platitudes from the curb is one thing. Getting inside the kitchen and dealing in
voters’ reality is another.
If Republicans want to save the country from the gift-giving
co-dependent Democrats, they better focus on the tangible goods that its ideas
deliver (or deliver us from, as the case may be), and drop the rhetoric down a
size or two so it fits inside voters’ heads.
Am I the only one who noticed the difference it made, for example, when
Mitt Romney stopped saying Obamacare will bankrupt the country, instead
pointing out that Obamacare raided the existing Medicare program? Romney saw near-instant improvement in his
polling just by showing that Obamacare was not free. That’s called retailing.
A lot more will be said about the end of civilization coming
as a result of President Obama’s having the chance to act with impunity, now that
the election is over. It’s not a matter
of compromising or accommodating the “new normal.” There is much to fight against and fight we
must. But if voters don’t believe
Republicans are talking about them specifically, or that the foretold dangers
of Obama’s policies exist only in the abstract, 2012 proves they will not
vote just on fear.
A lot of fresh thinking and in-depth research on who does
not vote Republican is much in order. The Karl Rove
strategy of maximizing turning out the conservative “base” was disproved by the
simple fact there were not enough of Tea Party folks voting to do the job. Ascertaining a deeper understanding of large chunks of non-voters’
motivations and wants, starting with the two million or so who dropped off GOP radars
from 2008, should be the second priority.
The first priority is knowing you were trounced.
