Even before the election results were tallied, some Republican commentators were already speculating who or what would be to blame if Mitt Romney lost the presidential race.
The finger-pointing started almost immediately after President Barack Obama’s re-election win. The GOP has been fervently dissecting this election season, especially the last few weeks leading up to election night, to determine what went wrong.
Here are five of the excuses conservatives of the Republican Party are giving for their loss:
1. Hurricane Sandy
Mitt Romney blamed the monster storm as a factor during a private breakfast with campaign donors the morning after elections, but he’s not the only one from his camp who believes it, too.
“It broke the momentum that Romney had coming in to the end of October,” Gov. Haley Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told Today’s Matt Lauer.
Barbour and other conservatives believe the storm that came barreling up the east coast last week, killing over a hundred people and displacing even more, gave President Obama the perfect opportunity to look presidential. His actions were watched closely as he visited hurricane victims and worked alongside New Jersey governor Chris Christie. Some even sized him up against George W. Bush during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
According to Gallup, Romney held a three to five point lead during the presidential debate period. Once Sandy hit, the east coast voter support for Obama increased by 6 points, but support in other regions more or less stayed the same. As far as some are concerned, though, the storm completely derailed the Romney campaign.
QStar Group chairman Dean Chambers, who predicted a win for Romney for weeks, said the hurricane changed the dynamics of the campaign..
“I’m not blaming the storm,” he told Forbes. “But Hurricane Sandy took the election as a whole off the front pages for four to five days. After that, it got a lot closer.”
Republican Chris Christie’s praises to Obama during storm relief also sent things over the edge in conservatives’ minds. What Christie defended as a simple partnership with the president to help victims of the storm was seen as a traitorous hugging and hand-holding media affair by those on the right.
Robert Stacey McCain wrote in The American Spectator:
“The list of fools who have brought this disaster upon us certainly also will include New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the gelatinous clown who (a) hogged up a prime time spot at the Republican convention to sing his own praises; (b) embraced Obama as the hero of Hurricane Sandy and (c) then refused to appear at campaign events in support of Romney’s presidential campaign.”
2. America isn’t “America” anymore
The GOP is struggling to adapt to the fact that times are changing, and with it, the faces of Americans.
In a comment reminiscent of Romney’s almost campaign-sinking 47 percent remark, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly lamented election night that “it’s not a traditional America anymore.”
“The white establishment is now the minority,” he said. “And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama, overwhelming black vote for President Obama, and women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?”
He also said 50 percent of the voting public is made up of people who “want stuff.”
“They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it, and he ran on it,” O’Reilly added.
If by “stuff” and “things,” he means the health care, economic and civil rights concerns of the large number of African-American, Latino, and female voters who showed up at the polls, then it’s no wonder Romney didn’t secure the win he was looking for.
3. Romney Was Too Moderate
Huffington Post’s John Ziegler wrote the day before elections that if Romney were to lose it would be because of his performance in the third presidential debate. He claimed Romney stood down when he should have been more aggressive.
“Mitt Romney had President Obama on the ropes going into the third debate,” he wrote. “He could have knocked him out for good on the Benghazi fiasco but his people miscalculated and thought it wasn’t worth the risk because they already had enough momentum to carry them to the finish line.”
Since the elections, other conservatives have been echoing the same idea.
“What we got was a weak, moderate candidate, hand-picked by the Beltway elites and country-club establishment wing of the Republican party,” Jenny Beth Martin, head of the Tea Party Patriots, said. “The presidential loss is unequivocally on them.”
The Hill’s Erik Wasson wrote that conservatives believe Romney’s centrist, middle-of-the-road approach toward the end of the campaign cost him the presidency.
4. Democratic Voter Suppression
Karl Rove appeared on Fox News Thursday with the answer for Romney’s failed presidential bid: voter suppression.
According to Rove, President Obama won by “suppressing the vote” with negative campaign ads, which he said turned off voters.
Having had a chance to collect himself after his near meltdown election night on Fox News when Ohio was called for President Obama, Rove insisted that the president won by convincing people not to vote for Romney.
“He succeeded by suppressing the vote, by saying to people, ‘you may not like who I am and I know you can’t bring yourself to vote for me, but I’m going to paint this other guy as simply a rich guy who only cares about himself.'”
It seems Rove has confused campaigning with actual attempts to prevent voters from getting to the polls.
And he was also unable to provide further explanation for his claim, only saying that President Obama is the first president in history to win a second term with a smaller percentage of the vote.
5. Voters’ Ignorance
Republican Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson has also chimed in to share his opinion on where all the blame lies. Apparently, it’s in the hands of the voters.
In an interview with the Associated Press on Wednesday, Johnson said, “If you aren’t properly informed, if you don’t understand the problems facing this nation, you are that much more prone to falling prey to demagoguing solutions. And the problem with demagoguing solutions is they don’t work.”
“I am concerned about people who don’t fully understand the very ugly math we are facing in this country,” he added.
But as Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel points out, voters have had even more access to information this election year than any other in the past. This year, both parties outspent themselves to win voters to their side.
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