Last Thursday’s New York Times long-form piece, “Can the Republicans Be Saved From Obsolescence?,” is a good read, even if it doesn’t present anything unexpected. GOP intransigence and policy are costing the party votes, and so is its outdated electioneering, the piece says.
Robert Draper, the author, touches on the Democratic campaign edge in all things technological, digital, and youthful:
“They were playing chess while we were playing checkers,” a senior member of the [Romney] campaign’s digital team somberly told another top Romney aide shortly after the election. Later, the top aide would participate in a postelection forum with Obama’s campaign manager. He told me (albeit, like a few people I spoke to, under the condition that he not be identified criticizing his party), “I remember thinking, when Jim Messina was going over the specifics of how they broke down and targeted the electorate: ‘I can’t play this game. I have to play a different game, so that I don’t look like an idiot in front of all these people.’ ”
It’s a familiar theme in post-election analysis. Yet there’s some reason to believe the Obama campaign’s alleged dominance of the hapless Romney effort wasn’t all that important.
Alan Abramowitz, a professor at Emory University, has taken a preliminary look at what was behind President Obama’s victory. He reports:
The results presented in Figure 4 indicate that Barack Obama’s victory was highly predictable based on his approval rating more than four months before the 2012 election. Indeed, forecasting models based on state and national polls generally showed Obama with a consistent advantage over Mitt Romney from the start of the 2012 campaign to the finish. Contrary to the claims of some political commentators, Hurricane Sandy, which struck the northeastern United States a week before the election, had little or no impact on the outcome of the presidential election. Nor can the president’s victory be attributed to his campaign’s superior field organization or its use of highly sophisticated data mining and voter targeting techniques to boost turnout of Obama supporters in the swing states.
Moreover, in a blog post called “What If the Obama Campaign Didn’t Win Him the Election,” John Sides, a professor at George Washington University, writes:
As I understand the “formidable campaign” narrative, it’s that [the] Obama campaign simply did a lot of things much better than the Romney campaign. If so, then one possible implication is this:
Obama should have done better where the two campaigns went head-to-head, relative to places where neither side was campaigning. That is, even though Obama was expected to lose votes in most states relative to a more favorable year like 2008, he should have done better in the battleground states, relative to non-battleground states, because the battleground states were where his campaign’s hypothesized prowess—in fundraising, messaging, GOTV, etc.—was manifest. So did that happen?
No.
I’m not totally sure what the right conclusion to draw from all of this is. Republicans definitely need to up their online/twenty-first-century game, but maybe the panic over the Democrats’ campaign edge is overly-dramatic.
Check out this post by Patrick Egan on the The Monkey Cage blog (a great blog I started reading recently, and the source for most of this post) from a few months ago. Egan finds:
The [GDP] growth rate between January and September of 2012 averaged 1.8 percent. As shown in the figure, this yielded a predicted share of 51.2 percent of the two-party vote for incumbent Obama. How well did this forecast the actual outcome? Right now (as of noon on November 8th) the popular vote totals stand at 60,771,081 for Obama and 57,876,223 for Romney—exactly 51.2 percent for the incumbent. The results stand exactly—one might even say fundamentally—where the fundamentals would predict.
So, maybe election outcomes are more predestined than we think, and campaign operatives, donors, and journalists are not nearly as important as they think they are. I’m not sure, but it’s something to consider.