When Mitt Romney has a “private” conversation with donors, interesting things happen.
Back in May, Mother Jones magazine obtained secret recordings of a Boca Raton fundraiser in which Romney dissed 47 percent of the country as freeloaders.
This time, the Republican Party’s latest presidential candidate huddled with top givers to his campaign, and opined about the reasons for his loss last Tuesday.
From the Los Angeles Times:
Mitt Romney told his top donors Wednesday that his loss to President Obama was a disappointing result that neither he or his top aides had expected, but said he believed his team ran a “superb” campaign with “no drama,” and attributed his rival’s victory to “the gifts” the administration had given to blacks, Hispanics and young voters during Obama’s first term.
Obama, Romney argued, had been “very generous” to blacks, Hispanics and young voters. He cited as motivating factors to young voters the administration’s plan for partial forgiveness of college loan interest and the extension of health coverage for students on their parents’ insurance plans well into their 20s. Free contraception coverage under Obama’s healthcare plan, he added, gave an extra incentive to college-aged women to back the president.
Romney argued that the Obama’s health care plan’s promise of coverage “in perpetuity” was “highly motivational” to those voters making $25,000 to $35,000 who might not have been covered, as well as to African American and Hispanic voters. Pivoting to immigration, Romney said the Obama campaign’s efforts to paint him as “anti-immigrant” had been effective and that the administration’s promise to offer what he called “amnesty” to the children of illegal immigrants had helped turn out Hispanic voters in record numbers.
“The President’s campaign,” he said, “focused on giving targeted groups a big gift—so he made a big effort on small things. Those small things, by the way, add up to trillions of dollars.”
It was an interesting assessment by Romney to some of the donors who gave his campaign “gifts” of around $900 million — nearly twice as much as Romney said he had expected to raise — presumably because they believed Romney would give them the “gifts” of endless tax breaks.
To be sure, the Obama campaign benefited from record turnout and vote shares among black, Hispanic and young voters, all of whom matched or exceeded their 2008 levels.
NBC Latino: Romney: Obama won because of ‘gifts’ he gave Latinos, blacks and young voters
The Obama campaign’s National African-American vote director, Stefanie Brown, sent out an email Wednesday touting black turnout, noting that “more African-Americans voted in 2012 than in 2008,” and that in key states like North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania and Virginia, African-Americans matched their 2008 share of the electorate, making up 23 percent of voters in North Carolina, 13 percent in Pennsylvania, 20 percent in Virginia and 13 percent in Florida.
In Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, the share of African-Americans in the electorate actually increased over 2008, by between 2 and 4 percent.
The Obama campaign wasn’t alone in pointing out how pivotal black turnout was to Obama’s success. New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote that: “Without the Democratic black vote joining with that of liberal whites and Hispanics… Obama would likely have lost half the states that he won.”
But Romney misses the point when he reduces that strong turnout — and the record 72 percent of Hispanics and two-thirds of young voters who preferred Obama over him, to a transaction in which those votes were exchanged for trinkets (I for one have not received my “gifts…”). He would do better to begin his assessment by looking in the mirror.
As Henry Decker explains in The National Memo:
Obama’s overwhelming support among the black community is not hard to figure out. While African-Americans are historically the Democratic party’s most reliable constituency — and many in the community feel a special connection to the bi-racial Obama — the Republican party surely drove any undecideds into the Democratic camp by actively antagonizing the black community throughout the campaign.
From Mitt Romney’s widely derided, antagonistic speech to the NAACP, to his reliance on bigoted surrogates like John Sununu and Donald Trump, to his flagrantly false ad campaign invoking well-known dog whistles about welfare reform, to the Republican party’s transparent attempts to discourage minorities from voting through “voter ID” laws, the GOP was disturbingly comfortable with using racial politics to build an elderly, white coalition in 2012.
The voter suppression laws were especially egregious. The laws were clearly targeted at minority voters, a fact that some Republicans didn’t even try to hide. Former Florida Republican Party chairman Jim Greer, for example,admitted under oath that “political consultants and staff were talking about voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting,” and added that party officials discussed how “minority outreach programs were not fit for the Republican Party.”
Ironically, scare tactics such as the menacing billboards that went up in black neighborhoods in Cleveland ultimately backfired, increasing black voters’ motivation to get to the polls. As Latino Decisions co-founder Matt Barreto told The Nation‘s Ari Berman, “There were huge organizing efforts in the black, Hispanic and Asian community, more than there would’ve been, as a direct result of the voter suppression efforts.”
It’s not just black voters who turned their backs on Romney and his campaign.
He, after all, was the author of a 2009 op-ed saying the federal government should “let Detroit go bankrupt”; produced false ads claiming Chrysler was going to outsource Jeep jobs to China, only to be slapped down by both General Motors’ and Chryslers’ CEOs; named as his running-mate Paul Ryan, the author of a House of Representatives plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program; and made serial mistakes during the campaign — including the infamous “47 percent” remarks — that alienated white working class voters, who were crucial to Romney’s defeat in his home state of Michigan, Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin, and of course, in Ohio.
It’s also not exactly rocket science that Latino voters preferred the president who issued an executive order protecting young DREAMers from forced separation from their families, to the guy who advises immigrants to self-deport while referring to human beings as “illegals.”
Is Romney really so shocked… shocked!… to discover that young people preferred the guy who cut banks out as student loan middlemen and expanded Pell Grants, over the team that wanted to eliminate federal education funding and slash the Department of Education down to the size where you can drown it in a bathtub?
And it’s not exactly surprising that women who were appalled by the number of Republicans who made contraception, abortion and even rape into campaign issues decided to pass over the ticket that included Congressman Ryan, who has described rape as just another “method of conception,” and go with the guy who signed the Lily Ledbetter Equal Pay Act.
That’s not transactional — it’s rational. Even Ayn Rand would say so.
And while I’m not a businessperson like Mr. Romney, I’d guess that the best way to attract black, Hispanic and young voters — let’s call them customers — back to the Republican Party is probably not to continually insult them as only voting for whoever hands them “gifts.”
Romney has decided to double down on his “makers vs. takers” argument that Americans who vote for Obama only do so because they want “free stuff.” (Ryan, meanwhile, in his own post-mortem of the campaign, claimed that the reason he and Romney lost was because of all those “urban” folk…) But the truth of the matter, and of the campaign, is that to paraphrase the Republican Party’s favorite slogan during the 2012 campaign: if you’re Mitt Romney or a member of his party and you lost in the recent election — you built that.
Follow Joy Reid on Twitter at @thereidreport.