Some of Romney’s allies urged him not to back down, believing that his remarks framed a sharp contrast of capitalistic individualism versus socialized citizenship. Years later, in light of how the 2016 campaign unfolded, some Republicans adopted a revisionist theory that their 2012 nominee would have survived the controversy—and won the electon—if only he hadn’t been so apologetic.
But the political problem with Romney’s “47 percent” remark wasn’t that it offended the delicate sensibilities of the left; it was that it unwittingly marginalized many Americans on the right.
“Most of the tax receipts come in from a certain number of these [wealthy] people, and the redistribution then naturally occurs with entitlement programs. If you’re going to take those away, that’s not necessarily a position that most of our voters would support,” Cantor says, recalling his reaction to Romney’s comment. “I’m not so sure the people who were voting for us as Republicans were, on the whole, as ideological as we thought they were.”
The country was changing, and so, too, were partisan attitudes. The Republican political class failed to see the ground shifting beneath it, operating as though its voters had a static worldview that aligned with the party’s intellectual elite. In fact, evidence had mounted since Bush 43’s reelection that on many issues, most notably trade, foreign intervention, and entitlement spending, the party’s base had become more populist than conservative.
The hints of this ideological volatility were sufficient to justify the “referendum” strategy, even as it made Romney uncomfortable and Ryan downright angry. The vice-presidential pick joined what he thought was a cause: drawing a bright line between two visions for America. When he realized that wasn’t the case, Ryan began griping—to his family, his friends, his fellow congressmen—that Stevens’s strategy was making it hard for Republicans to win and, if they did, even harder for them to govern.
“The Bush pivot from a national security campaign to ‘I want to do these entitlement reforms’ taught me you have to run on that stuff. . . . It convinced me that you have to run campaigns on ideas and you have to make them really clear choices,” Ryan says. “Stuart Stevens was the campaign strategist. I came on for the last eighty-eight days, so obviously, it wasn’t my campaign. I just think he ran more of an anti-Obama campaign: Obama sucks, therefore vote for Mitt Romney.”
THOSE LAST EIGHTY-EIGHT DAYS CONTAINED ENOUGH MELODRAMA TO fill an entire election cycle.
There was Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, the GOP Senate nominees in Missouri and Indiana, respectively, talking about “legitimate rape” and rape-induced pregnancies as part of God’s plan;13 Obama warning of “a red line” in Syria, raising the specter of American involvement in another war; Clint Eastwood arguing with an empty chair, imaginarily occupied by Obama, during a surreal one-man performance in prime time at the Republican convention; terrorists killing four Americans at the embassy in Benghazi, Libya; three heated presidential debates, including one in which Obama mocked Romney’s claim that Russia was America’s top geopolitical foe; and Superstorm Sandy devastating the Eastern Seaboard one week before Election Day, killing more than one hundred people and costing $70 billion in damage, capped by Christie, the New Jersey governor, heaping praise on Obama’s handling of the disaster.
Despite this roller-coaster final few months of the campaign, the fundamentals of the race remained steady: Obama maintained a modest but meaningful lead over Romney in the key battleground states. Meanwhile, the national polling suggested a dead heat: Surveys from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal showed Obama at 48 percent and Romney at 47 percent, while ABC News and the Washington Post showed Obama at 49 percent and Romney at 48 percent.
At the president’s Chicago headquarters, Axelrod and his team saw no path to victory for their opponent. Romney could conceivably win back the battlegrounds of Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina, but those states would not get him to the requisite 270 Electoral votes. Romney needed something else—Pennsylvania, perhaps, or some combination of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—but those states were locked down. The race, they told Obama, was over.
In Boston, the Republican nominee’s brain trust had an entirely different outlook. Ohio was in the bag, they told Romney, and both Florida and North Carolina were looking good as well. With Pennsylvania breaking their way late (as a flurry of their internal polling suggested) and Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota all in play, Romney was well positioned. There was none of the backbiting and blame-shifting that defined the final days of the McCain campaign. Everyone in Romney’s camp believed he was going to be the president of the United States.
This was a bit jarring for Reince Priebus to hear. The RNC’s polling, as well as national surveys he pored over daily, gave no such cause for optimism. “How is it that you guys are the only people in America that have Romney up, while every other public poll shows him down?” the party chairman asked Romney’s senior staff on a conference call two days before the election. The session descended into an argument over polling methodology and Priebus hung up, worried that his party’s nominee was walking into a buzz saw.
As the candidates ended their campaigning with a final push through the Midwest—Obama in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Ohio; Romney in Ohio and Pennsylvania—both felt certain that victory was at hand.
ELECTION DAY 2012 WAS HARROWING FOR THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.
The party’s nominee wasn’t the only one convinced he was headed to the White House. His running mate, Ryan, told his wife and children to prepare for a move to Washington—this despite Priebus warning him on Election Day that things didn’t look good. But something was in the water. Boehner, McConnell, Cantor—all the party’s leaders believed that Romney was going to win, and for the same reason: Their data showed that Obama had bled too much support among working-class and middle-class white voters, especially in the industrial Midwest.
Romney was paralyzed, then, by the returns coming in from Ohio on the night of November 6. He wasn’t just going to lose the Buckeye State; he was going to win fewer total votes there than McCain had four years earlier, when the race was barely competitive. The upshot was obvious. Ohio was Romney’s strongest state in the Midwest. If he wasn’t going to win there, he wasn’t going to win anywhere. He wasn’t going to win the presidency.
Dazed and devastated, Republicans tried to make sense of what they were seeing. Fewer votes than McCain? In Ohio? How was it possible? The comprehensive answer provided weeks later by Romney’s pollster, Neil Newhouse, was that two hundred thousand white voters who turned out in 2008 had stayed home in 2012, the result of disillusionment with Obama and distaste for Romney. But even before that analysis, the exit polling of voters who did show up told a simple story:14
22 percent of Ohio voters said the most important quality they looked for in a candidate is that he “cares about people like me”; Obama won 84 percent of them.
56 percent of Ohio voters thought Romney’s policies would favor the rich; Obama won 87 percent of them.
60 percent of Ohio voters supported the bailout of the Detroit automakers; Obama won 74 percent of them.
It was the same story in exit polling all across the country. Voters perceived Romney to be unsympathetic to the working man, an advocate of the super-affluent, someone who couldn’t possibly empathize with the struggles of everyday people. Obama’s team spent much of 2012 framing this picture, and with the “47 percent” commentary, Romney had colored it in himself.