“The reason I got involved in politics was to try and help the average American,” Romney says. Noting his struggle to connect with those average Americans, he adds, without a hint of irony, “The skill in communicating that is a particular capability that I wish I had in more abundance.”
Trump, who attended Romney’s Election Night party and recalls with a certain glee watching the candidate’s staff agonizing over the results in Ohio, says, “Maybe they focused on the wrong things and in the wrong areas, because they lost Ohio by a fairly substantial amount.” When I cite the low turnout of working-class whites, Trump can no longer suppress his grin: “And I brought them out in numbers that they never even knew existed. Because they liked me.”
Romney (and the party at large) also performed dismally with swing voters. Though he won independents by 5 points, that number was misleading; self-described “moderates” were a much larger chunk of the electorate, and Obama carried that group by 15 points. Meanwhile, Obama won women by 12 points, and Romney won men by 8 points; that combined 20-point “gender gap” was the widest margin seen in a presidential election since 1952, according to Gallup. (Some credit was due Akin and Mourdock, both of whom snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in losing their red state Senate races.)
“The dangerous Mitt Romney, to us, would have been the Mitt Romney appealing to moderate voters and suburban woman. And he never really got there,” Axelrod says. “He had to distort himself to win the nomination; he had to present himself as further to the right than he really was. I don’t think closing Planned Parenthood was actually a passion project of his. I don’t think there was anything in his record in Massachusetts that suggested he would be a fervent anti-immigration foe, and as a businessman he probably felt the opposite way. But he had to paint this portrait of himself that would pass muster in the new Republican Party.”
Although Romney failed to turn out white voters in certain states, he did win an impressive majority of those who showed up: 59 percent of whites backed Romney nationwide, compared to just 39 percent for the president. This was 4 points lower than Obama’s 43 percent showing against McCain four years earlier, and the worst performance among whites by a Democratic nominee since Walter Mondale during Ronald Reagan’s forty-nine-state steamrolling in 1984.
It would have once been unthinkable for a presidential candidate to lose 59 percent of whites and still win the White House. But the acceleration of demographic change in the country made it possible—as did Obama’s dominance among minority voters. The president won 93 percent of black voters and 73 percent of Asians. Most alarmingly, he carried 71 percent of Hispanics, the fastest-growing bloc of voters in the country, compared to just 27 percent for Romney, the worst showing for a Republican since Bob Dole in 1996. All told, Romney won just 17 percent of nonwhite voters nationwide.
There were a few bright spots for the Republican Party. Two of its longtime conservative stalwarts in the House, Mike Pence and Jeff Flake, won their statewide races for governor and senator, respectively. The GOP kept the House majority and picked up a Senate seat in Nebraska. And a star was born in Texas, where a conservative firebrand named Ted Cruz scored an upset victory in the primary and was headed to Washington with a full head of steam.
But there was little for the national ticket to celebrate. Romney had held Obama to 39 percent of white voters but still lost. Pushing that number any lower would prove exceptionally difficult—and not necessarily in the party’s long-term interest, given how the requisite policy emphases would register with other demographic groups. White voters without a college degree were the fastest-shrinking portion of the electorate, whereas the groups Obama owned (Hispanics, young people, women with college degrees) were booming as a share of the overall vote. Even before Romney’s concession speech, the case was being made that Republicans would be competitive in 2016 only by appealing to a broader segment of voters in the diverse states that George W. Bush had carried in 2004: Florida, Colorado, Virginia, Nevada, and New Mexico.
But there was a massive obstacle blocking this approach: the issue of immigration. Romney’s hard-line positions and clumsy rhetoric had alienated Hispanics, no doubt, but so, too, had five years’ worth of antagonism from Republicans dating back to Bush’s failed overhaul. The GOP’s perceived hostility toward nonwhites was repelling not just Hispanics and Asians, but also the suburbanites and business-friendly moderates who had anchored the party’s coalition for generations. Something had to be done.
“We’ve got to get rid of the immigration issue altogether,” Sean Hannity told listeners on his radio show two days after the election.15 “It’s simple to me to fix it. I think you control the border first. You create a pathway for those people that are here—you don’t say you’ve got to go home. And that is a position that I’ve evolved on. Because you know what? It’s got to be resolved. The majority of people here—if some people have criminal records you can send them home—but if people are here, law-abiding, participating for years, their kids are born here, you know, it’s first secure the border, pathway to citizenship, done.”
Hell had frozen over. Not only was Hannity of all people publicly endorsing “amnesty,” the dirtiest word in the conservative lexicon, but he was placing private calls to Republican leaders, including Cantor and Ryan, urging them to move cursorily in Congress while the issue had momentum.
They were a step ahead of him. The day after the election, Cantor gathered his team in Richmond and announced that he would support offering citizenship to children who had been brought to the United States illegally, a policy Republicans has opposed in the form of the DREAM Act. Boehner went even further. “I think a comprehensive approach is long overdue,” he told ABC’s Diane Sawyer that same week. “And I’m confident that the president, myself, others, can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all.”
All the while, inside the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, the chairman’s phone never stopped ringing. Donors, elected officials, activists, lobbyists, RNC members—everyone wanted the same thing: a declaration from atop the party that something would be done to prevent another such loss in the future. Priebus had been content to hang back since becoming chairman, toiling behind the scenes to improve the GOP’s infrastructure and ground game across the country. He had never believed it was the role of the national party to dictate policy from on high. Now he was prepared to do exactly that.
Gathering five of his closest allies, Priebus instructed them to produce a sweeping report on what had gone wrong in 2012 and how it would be avoided in presidential elections to come. It would lead off with immigration, stressing the need for comprehensive reform, but would also make a host of recommendations about engaging women, minorities, and young people, as well as making smarter investments in technology and data analytics.
Officially christened by RNC staffers as the Growth and Opportunity Project, it quickly earned a more ingenuous moniker: “the autopsy.”
Chapter Six
December 2012
“There must be atonement!”
THE TIME HAD COME AT THE END OF THE CONGRESS TO CHOOSE A NEW leader of the Republican Study Committee, and Steve Scalise, a Louisiana lawmaker first elected in 2008, wouldn’t take no for an answer.