The Obama Team Outmaneuvered Romney, Here's How they did it.
On the day after the 2010 midterm election that swept Republicans into control of the House of Representatives and decreased Democrats' majority in the Senate, senior White House adviser David Axelrod had a message for President Barack Obama.
"I think they just planted the seeds of your re-election," he told his boss.
"The most strident voices had seized control of the Republican Party and you knew that the nominee who would emerge either would come from that Tea Party base or would have to yield to it in order to be the nominee," Axelrod said.
That nominee ended up being former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, and Obama's campaign went on to exploit his ties to the conservative wing of his party and outmaneuver him to victory in the November 6 general election.
Axelrod, who left the White House to oversee strategy for the president's 2012 campaign, and fellow Democrats attribute Obama's decisive win on Tuesday to Obama and to a consistent strategy that sidelined Romney in key swing states.
An early and effective effort to define the former private equity executive as unfriendly to the middle class, a superior ground operation to get out the vote, and a deft response to missteps by Romney and his allies helped Obama overcome his own perceived weaknesses in presiding over a slow economic recovery.
"They successfully made this a choice election as opposed to a referendum on the president and the economy," said Michael Feldman, a Democratic strategist and former adviser to Vice President Al Gore. "They also used the critical months between the end of the (Republican) primary and the general election to better define Mitt Romney than the Romney campaign did."
That defining process turned out to be key.
In the spring and summer, Obama's campaign used a massive advertising package to highlight concerns about Romney's tenure as the head of Bain Capital and pounded the multi-millionaire executive for refusing to release several years of his personal tax returns.
The Romney campaign's slow response to that onslaught and failure to neutralize the criticism over his tax returns baffled Obama's Chicago team.
"Their inability to respond to attacks that they knew were coming, I think, was a major mistake on their part," said one Obama campaign official. "If they had made a decision they weren't going to release his taxes, they should have had a plan around how to deal with that."
MESSAGING, POLICY, GROUND GAME
Obama's campaign made mistakes, too. The president's first debate performance was widely panned and would have been blamed by many for his defeat if he had lost to Romney on Tuesday.
Democrats' slow acceptance of the financial influence of outside groups known as Super PACs was also cited earlier in the year as a strategic misstep.
But Obama's strength on the ground and effective messages - which Republicans viewed as particularly negative - made up for those weaknesses.
"They had a ground game that they worked on for five years," said Charlie Black, a Republican strategist who advised Romney.
"It's unusual for an incumbent president to run such a negative, divisive campaign, but they pulled it off."
Axelrod cited Romney's secretly taped comment that 47 percent of Americans were reliant on government, conservative policy positions on immigration and taxes, and his selection of budget hawk Paul Ryan as a running mate as key factors that tied him to the right and turned off mainstream voters.
"I think it was a mistake," Axelrod said of Wisconsin Representative Ryan's selection. "I think it was a way for
(Romney) to coalesce his base and get through his convention."
In an election that was determined by the fight over swing states such as Ohio, where jobs tied to the auto industry are critical, Obama's team also deftly highlighted Romney's opposition to Obama's auto bailout and his published opinion piece that suggested Detroit, Michigan-based companies should be allowed to fail.
"Whoever decided that they should use the phraseology 'Let Detroit Go Bankrupt' should probably not get employed as a political consultant again," said an Obama campaign worker. "It definitely has haunted them in Ohio in a big way."
Obama ended up winning Ohio and most of the battleground states that he and Romney both coveted, granting him another four-year term.
The Republicans seemed to have no idea about what was happening. They refused to believe the polls and developed an alternate universe in which to dream.
Dear ACV Democratic News,
Wow, what a week!
Thanks to the Amherst County Democrats, we re-elected our outstanding President, Barack Obama.
Thanks to you, we picked up Democratic seats in the House of Representatives.
And thanks to you, against all odds, we didn’t just defend our Democratic Senate majority, we expanded it -- and we made
2012 another Year of the Woman by electing the most women to the U.S. Senate in history.
Thank you so much to you and our entire PAC for a Change family for stepping up whenever one of our great candidates needed your help. Together, we contributed more than $1.5 million for Democratic candidates across the country, when they needed our support the most.
What a victory for democracy, for the middle class, for equality for all, for women and those who care about us, and for a national government that has our backs.
What a victory for America.
And, maybe most meaningfully for me personally, 20 women will be serving together in the U.S. Senate starting in January -- the most ever -- and 30 percent of our Senate Democratic caucus will be women.
I hope you're as proud of that accomplishment as I am.
Thanks for everything that you did to make the 2012 election a huge success for our country. Best wishes to Chairman David Burford and also to Skipper Fitts, Ned Kable, Rosemary Witcombe and Magnolia Braxton. Thanks to the whole team, you have fired up the Amherst Democrats and your efforts are appreciated. Special thanks to Simone Faas and the Sweet Briar Young Democrats. The youth vote was a large part of this victory.
In friendship,
Barbara Boxer
U.S. Senator
A forceful advocate for families, children, consumers, the environment and her State of California, Barbara Boxer became a United States Senator in January 1993 after 10 years of service in the House of Representatives and six years on the Marin County Board of Supervisors. In November 2010, she was reelected to her fourth term in the Senate.
Phony Voices Republicans Listen To
Scott Rasmussen is a Fox News Propogandist with a Phony Republican Leaning Poll. Why Republicans prefer being lied to
is anybodies guess since the moment of truth comes when the ballots are counted. For some reason they eat up the phoney news at Fox and all the fake experts that Fox employs.
For the past year conservatives have put their trust in one pollster and one pollster alone. While nearly every other pollster showed President Obama leading throughout the last year’s presidential race, Rasmussen Reports consistently showed better numbers for Romney, and had Romney leading through much of the last month.
Conservative pundits claimed that Rasmussen was the only pollster showing the true state of the race, even though previous studies suggested that Rasmussen’s numbers actually leaned too far to the right in previous elections. The Election Day results are now in, and Rasmussen was not only off in their projection, but far off in many cases. Consider the following numbers:
Rasmussen’s last national poll had Romney with a one point lead (49 percent to 48 percent). Obama ended up winning by two points (50 percent to 48 percent).
Rasmussen had Romney winning Virginia by two points (50 percent to 48 percent). With 97 percent of precincts reporting Obama is winning Virginia by three points (51 percent to 48 percent).
Rasmussen Reports final Iowa poll had Romney winning the state by one point (49 percent to 48 percent). With 96 percent of precincts reporting Obama is winning Iowa by six points (52 percent to 46 percent).
Rasmussen had Romney and Obama tied at 49 percent in Wisconsin. With 98 percent of precincts reporting Obama is
currently winning Wisconsin by seven points (53 percent to 46 percent).
In Colorado, Rasmussen Reports had Romney winning by three points (50 percent to 47 percent). With 90 percent of precincts reporting Obama is winning Colorado by four points (51 percent to 47 percent).
In Ohio, Rasmussen Reports had the race tied at 49 percent. With 90 percent of precincts reporting Obama is currently winning the state by two points (50 percent to 48 percent).
Rasmussen’s biggest problem was they consistently had more Republicans in their samples that Democrats, even though other pollsters showed Democrats outnumbered Republicans. The actual election results proved Rasmussen and Chambers wrong.
Exit polls from yesterday show that Democrats actually outnumbered Republicans by six percentage points. This is
largely attributable to the fact that many former Republicans now identify themselves as independents. The other pollsters accounted for this conversion. Rasmussen Reports did not.
These margins of inaccuracy may not seem like much, but the other pollsters, such as Public Policy Polling, We Ask America, and Survey USA, did get their predictions right, which proves that it was possible. In many cases, like in Wisconsin, Rasmussen Reports strayed far from the average of other pollsters. Over the last year, Rasmussen has consistently been to the right of the Real Clear Politics average of polls, and now the election results prove that they “wrongly right.” This fact is worth keeping in mind as Rasmussen releases polls in future years for the 2014 midterms
and the 2016 presidential election.
Dick Morris, is The Man Bill and Hillary Clinton Threw Away. That's his only claim to fame. He works for Fox News and makes off the wall predictions that the sheep who watch Fox find trust worthy. Fox has one agenda, distort the news and attack President Obama at every opportunity. Fox and all its silly minions seem really useless today.
So, if you recall, ol' Dick Morris, he predicted something of a landslide for Mitt Romney. Something of a crazy landslide, actually, in which it was an absolute given that Obama had already lost Florida, Virginia and Colorado; in which Ohio, New Hampshire and Iowa had "eroded"; in which the "battleground" was Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota; and "Romney momentum" was going to "wash into formerly safe Democratic territory in New Jersey and Oregon."
This was almost perfectly incorrect -- a mountain of staggering wrongness, mitigated only slightly by the fact that Florida has not yet been called. And so this morning Morris has offered up his list of excuses in the form of a mea culpa titled "Why I Was Wrong":
"I've got egg on my face. I predicted a Romney landslide and, instead, we ended up with an Obama squeaker Morris said."
As you can read for yourself, we are not off to a particularly great start, here, since it was not so much an "Obama squeaker" as it was an election in which it became pretty obvious where things were going around 10 o'clock, and then Ohio ended up getting called much earlier than expected, and Obama went on to win quite handily.
Morris recovers, however:
"The key reason for my bum prediction is that I mistakenly believed that the 2008 surge in black, Latino, and young voter turnout would recede in 2012 to "normal" levels. Didn't happen. These high levels of minority and young voter participation are here to stay. And, with them, a permanent reshaping of our nation's politics."
If you just read his prediction, it isn't immediately apparent that an underestimation of the "black, Latino, and young voter turnout" is one of the conditions that underpinned his proposition that the nation was headed for a Romney landslide. Morris essentially said in his previous piece that Obama had produced a lot of negative ads, no one believed them, and that meant "reasonable voters saw that the voice of hope and optimism and positivism was Romney while the president was only a nitpicking, quarrelsome, negative figure."
But the underestimation of these voters is a bug in many a bum prediction, as are the assumptions that the 2010 voter turnout model had a meaningful relationship to the 2012 turnout, or the assumption that "independent voters" were breaking in a significant way for Romney when it was fairly obvious that the "independent voter" cohort was flooded with rebranded Republican voters. As David Axelrod said, "We may not win these voters, but we may not have to win these voters."
Does Morris go on to cite any of these factors in his mea culpa? Nope. He is thoroughly convinced that he was undone by the weather.
"But the more proximate cause of my error was that I did not take full account of the impact of hurricane Sandy and of Governor Chris Christie's bipartisan march through New Jersey arm in arm with President Obama. Not to mention Christie's fawning promotion of Obama's presidential leadership. It made all the difference."
Not really, actually! Philip Bump put together a simple graphic that illustrates the fact that Romney's momentum had ceased and Obama's had picked up again well before Sandy even got her name, and that by the time the storm made landfall, the race was no longer looking like a squeaker. The whole "Sandy altered the race because Chris Christie hung out with Obama" notion is just one more casualty in this year's war between "pundit narrative nonsense" and "quantifiable political science," won decisively by the scientists.
Not to worry, though. Morris will nevertheless enjoy another four-year term of being wrong and ridiculous, which only goes to prove that America is a great and charitable nation.
Fox will use the services of Dick Morris as long as he is willing to attack President Obama. Dick Morris is a small nothing of a man and Fox is a perfect match for this loser. Dick Morris is a joke.
To: Amherst County Virginia Democratic News
We did it! Thank you.
It was a battle hard fought. We built the largest, most dynamic grassroots organization in history, and we beat back the
unprecedented outside spending on the other side. On Tuesday, voters chose to move forward, giving President Obama four more years to finish what we started together.
I am so proud of the tens of thousands of supporters who made phone calls, knocked on doors till their knuckles were sore, talked to their friends and neighbors, or chipped in what they could to support President Obama and Democrats -- you all made this possible. This victory is yours.
We can't stop here.
We have more battles ahead and we need to work together with President Obama to continue building an economy from the
middle class out -- and a country where prosperity, education, and equal rights aren't limited to those who can afford them.
So thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I will never forget the night we re-elected President Barack Obama, and I will never forget your support. Thank You ACVDN.
All the best,
Debbie
Debbie Wasserman Schultz
Chair
Democratic National Committee
Rep. Wasserman Schultz is a person respected by her colleagues for her tenacity and her hard work on many important issues. In March 2009, after announcing her own battle with breast cancer, she introduced the Education and Awareness Requires Learning Young Act, or EARLY Act (H.R. 1740), a piece of legislation that directs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop and implement a national education campaign about the threat breast cancer poses to all young women, and the particular heightened risks of certain ethnic, cultural and racial groups. This bill became law as part of the Affordable Health Care Act in March, 2010.
A fighter for South Florida families, Rep. Wasserman Schultz has worked hard to protect children. Some of her accomplishments in the field include the passage of the PROTECT Our Children Act, which creates the largest law enforcement effort ever formed for the protection of children (H.R. 3845), and, the passage of the Virginia Graeme Baker Pool and Spa Safety Act (H.R. 1721) to combat childhood drowning.
In 2011 she became the Democratic Vice Chair of the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, a bipartisan Members’ organization dedicated to promoting women’s economic, health, legal, and educational interests. The Caucus serves as both a legislative resource on women’s issues and an advocate on behalf of those issues.
Donald "The Chump" Trump
Donald Trump is a sickening, arrogant, petty little piece of crap of a human being and a Fox contributor. Trump is a birther, a liar and a fool and the darling of right wing republicans.
Donald Trump’s Twitter meltdown over President Obama’s reelection is a disgrace. Trump called for a revolution to
contest an election in which President Obama won the popular vote, 50% to 48% and won in the Electoral College. The U.S. Secret Service should pay him a visit for trying to incite violence against the president in his call for a revolution. He has since deleted that tweet which Called for ‘Revolution’ and ‘March on Washington’ Over Obama’s Reelection. Donald Trump’s is an idiot and has made a complete fool of himself.
Trump hastily backtracked over his calls for a 'revolution' after branding Obama's re-election a 'disgusting injustice' Trump ranted on Twitter when it became clear Obama would win election and then Later deleted tweet calling for a revolution.
NBC's Brian Williams lashed out against Trump on air, saying he had 'driven well past the last exit to relevance'.
Trump, never a man to make any showing of good sense then attacked Williams and his 'boring' newscasts.
Donald Trump has backtracked over a series of scathing tweets he wrote about President Obama as he secured a second term
last night - hastily deleting messages calling for a 'revolution'.
And when NBC's Brian Williams lambasted Trump's Twitter tantrum on his show, the outspoken fool who plays a business
mogul on tv turned his anger on the host and his 'boring' newscasts.
Trump took to the social networking site after the president's victory was projected by several news outlets on Tuesday night, and claimed the re-election was a 'great and disgusting injustice'. The real great and disgusting injustice is that a tv network pays Trump money to do a tv show.
After a barrage of outraged messages, Trump added: 'He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!' Trump is an out right liar when he says Obama lost the popular vote and calling for a revolution should land him and his stupid hair style in federal prison for 2 to 5 years. Perhaps Trump is addicted to drugs, that might explain his looney behavior.
As it became apparent that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney would not win the election, the Donald’s tweets became more enraged, and more hyperbolic.
Trump began with: 'Well, back to the drawing board!'
He quickly followed up with a call to revolution. The Trump wrote: 'He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!' - before deleting the tweet.
But he was far from over. 'This election is a total sham and a travesty,' he wrote. 'We are not a democracy! He added America is in 'serious and unprecedented trouble like never before'.
The 66-year-old later went onto attack the Electoral College, but offered a kernel of hope for the still-Republican House of Representatives.
‘Hopefully the House can hold our country together for four more years,’ Trump tweeted.
‘House shouldn’t give anything to Obama unless he terminates Obamacare.’ He did not tweet anything after Romney's gracious concession speech.
But he didn't keep his anger quiet for long, unleashing yet more scathing remarks on Wednesday morning - this time against Brian Williams, who uses the Twitter handle @bwilliams.
He wrote: '@bwilliams knows that I think his newscast has become totally boring so he took a shot at me last night.'
'The only thing more boring than @bwilliams newscast is his show Rock Center which is totally dying in the ratings - a disaster!' he added, before asking him: 'Wouldn't you love to have my ratings?'
He went on: 'If I'm "well past the last exit to relevance" how come you spent so much time reading my tweets last night?'
Trump’s attacks on Obama have been more frequent in the weeks preceding the election. Trump gives every indication that he is suffering with a mental illness. The Trumpster may have a case of Romnesia.
Only last week, he lashed out at the commander-in-chief for using Superstorm Sandy to garner more votes and essentially buy the election.
The billionaire’s grudge hasn’t gone unnoticed by the president.
During a recent appearance on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, Obama quipped that their rivalry began when the two were growing up in Kenya.
‘We had constant run-ins on the soccer field, he wasn’t that good,’ Obama told the NBC late-night host.
An Offer Obama could and did refuse: Ahead of the election, Trump offered to pay $5million to the charity of President Obama's choice if he released his college and passport records.
Here are some photos of the celebration that took place after President Obama crossed the 270 mark and won his second term.
Amherst County Virginia Democratic News
ACVDN
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