Lessons of Defeat: Republican Party Responses to the 2012 Presidential Election
Kenneth R. Mayer
Department of Political Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Prepared for The U.S 2012 Presidential Election: Campaign and Results, Lauder School of
Government, Diplomacy and Strategy, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya, Israel, January
6-8, 2013
A presidential election leads – always – to very different responses. The winner basks in
the glow of victory, and enjoys the energy that comes with the transition (for a first term) or the
continuity of a second term. At minimum, the four years of presidential power and authority
provide significant opportunities to enact and extend agendas. For the loser and the losing party,
the reactions are, obviously, different. The losing candidate confronts a devastating and public
disappointment that often never completely heals.1 Typically there are extended discussions of
what went wrong and whether the loss was the result of a poor candidate, an ineffective
campaign, a problem with the party, or an unexpected and uncontrollable set of events. Was the
election a contest of ideas over the role of government? A referendum on the incumbent’s
performance in a first term? A clash between two personalities? A simple failure to organize
and mobilize? A natural disaster?
The latter reaction is more interesting, as it forces the losing side to confront some
difficult analytical and strategic problems, as well as deal with the recriminations of participants
anxious to pin blame on someone or something else. It is a harder problem as well, because
unlike the party controlling the White House – which benefits from the president's unquestioned
position as party symbol – it is far less clear who speaks for the out-party. The contrasting forces
that emerge in a close election compound the difficulty. On the one hand, a close election can
mean that a minor change in tactics, a better get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort, or more advertising
in crucial states could have delivered the election. On the other, an unexpected loss in a hard
fought campaign can obscure a more fundamental problem, if party leaders convince themselves
that the causes are all tactical.
1
The magnitude is almost certainly greater for unsuccessful challengers than it is for incumbents
denied a second term. For the latter, the loss changes their standing in history, but they still
become ex-presidents. Losing challengers become footnotes. See Leahy (2005) and Popkin
(2012, pp. 261-262).
2
Where does the 2012 election fit into this framework? The results – a decisive win for
Obama, a loss of two Republican seats in the Senate even though the Democrats were defending
21 of the 33 seats up, and eight in the House – were widely interpreted as a repudiation of the
GOP agenda, and suggestive of a large problem with the GOP "public philosophy." Over the
past month, party elites have been digesting the results and beginning the process of figuring out
how to proceed.
While it is too soon to know with a high level of confidence precisely what happened in
2012 as far as the Republicans are concerned, it is possible to specify the contours of plausible
responses and identify the difficulties that the party faces in assessing its strategic position.
Mirroring the Democrats in the 1970s, the Republicans have clearly moved to the right over the
past decade,
My goal is to defend the following propositions about the 2012 election, as a preliminary
sketch of possible alternatives:
(1) Republicans believed that this was an election they thought they would win.
Over the past 100 years, there had never been an incumbent reelected with such
poor economic and political fundamentals.
(2) Romney lost, in large part, because of demographic and ideological shifts
that may render the party, at least in its present form, unable to compete at the
national level. The Republican Party base consists almost entirely of White
voters, who are a shrinking percentage of the electorate. A Republican nominee
would need to win this demographic by landslide margins to even come close to
a popular vote majority, and in 20 years even that might not be enough.
(3) The process of intraparty reform is complicated by the fact that party leaders
do not have the power to impose any major changes unilaterally. Unlike political
parties in parliamentary systems, parties in the U.S. are fragmented and are
simply unable to dictate reforms to either process or policy.
In most contexts election losses typically lead to moderation in policy. But the elected
3
officials at the top of formal party structures may misread voter sentiment, especially if these
elites are convinced that electoral losses result from something other than the party's positions:
"Due to ideological barriers and problems of selective perception, politicians can misidentify the
prevailing policy mood and fail to respond to changes in public opinion despite the shock of
successive electoral defeats" (Norris and Lovenduski 2004, 99).
It is not at all clear whether that will happen in the case of the GOP, and the results will
depend on ongoing competition among the various factions within the parties over what changes
are necessary. What is clear is that the process is an example of the general problem of
managing policy change in the face of evidence that voters reject key elements of existing party
positions, something that all party systems face.
I. GOP Prospects for Victory
According to most heuristics, President Obama faced a difficult path to reelection. The
simplest rules – presidents don’t get reelected when their approval ratings are below 50%, or
when their major policies are unpopular, or when the economy is struggling, or when
unemployment is high – all pointed toward a good chance of a Republican victory.2
By any standard, The “Great Recession” of 2009 was an economic calamity.
Unemployment reached a high of 10% in October 2009, a level that had not occurred since 1983;
the rate was higher than 8% for nearly four years (from February 2009 to August 2012), a
2
There are other purported rules that have no possible causal effect on the actual results, but
have “worked” as predictors over time, at least until they don’t work any more: the winner of the
World Series in presidential election year (American League: Democrats win the White House;
National League: Republicans win); the date of the election (Democrats don’t win when the
election is held on November 6); NFL games on the Sunday before election day (Washington
Redskins win: the incumbent is reelected; they lose: incumbent tossed out); candidate height
(the taller candidate wins). In 2012, all of these indicators forecast a Romney win.
4
sustained rate that had not been seen since the Depression (and critics argued that the only reason
the rate was not significantly higher was that millions of people had given up trying to find a job,
and were no longer factored into the unemployment calculations). Real GDP declined 3.1% in
2009, a drop that was greater than any other decline since 1946. In 2010 and 2011, 43% of
unemployed persons had been out of work for at least 6 months, a rate that dwarfed anything that
had occurred since the Depression (during the recession of 1983, which was the last time
unemployment exceeded 10%, the comparable figure was 23.9%).
In large part due to the economy, President Obama’s approval ratings were low. His
initial honeymoon ratings – between 60% and 69% through the first 8 months of his term – had
dropped to the high 40s by the Spring of 2010, and would go as low as 38% in the 3 day Gallup
tracking poll in late 2010. During this period the Iowa Electronic Market, a research-based
futures market on political outcomes, had participants forecasting that Obama would lose.
The Affordable Care Act, the signature domestic policy achievement of Obama’s first
term, was unpopular: During 2011 and most of 2012, polls showed that more people had a
negative view of the law than those who viewed it favorably, often by wide margins. By almost
4-1 margins, people thought the law would increase their health care costs; and twice as many
people thought the quality of their health care would get worse as get better.3 The key element of
that law, the insurance mandate which required individuals to have insurance or pay a penalty,
3
In a March 2012 CBS/New York Times Poll, 52% of respondents said they thought the
Affordable Care Act would increase their health care costs, against 15% who thought costs
would go down. 33% said they thought the law would worsen the quality of their health care,
against 17% who said quality would improve.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/03/27/us/03272012_polling_doc.html.
5
was particularly unpopular: in an April 2012 Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 70% of the public
said they disliked it, with only 30% favoring it.4
Republicans’ sense of their prospects in 2012 was enhanced the 2010 midterm elections,
in which the Democrats lost control of the House. The 67 seat swing was the largest loss for a
presidential incumbent party since the 1930s, and Republicans interpreted the results as a
resounding rejection of the health care law specifically, and a broader rejection of Obama’s
policies. The success of Tea Party-backed candidates pushed conservative issues to the forefront
of the Republican agenda, and it appeared to many as if the long-awaited conservative
resurgence had clear public support. Criticism of 2012 campaign polling would stress that the
polls failed to weight the partisan balance of the samples to reflect the 2010 pro-Republican
results.
Table 1 shows the results of a number of presidential election forecasting models
common in political science (Campbell 2012). What is especially noteworthy about these
forecasts is not just their range, or the fact that the median prediction was a bare Obama win
(50.6% of the two party vote); it is that none of the forecasts in Obama’s favor were very certain.
The average statistical confidence of an Obama win5 is only 0.68 for the models that produced an
estimated vote share above 50%. Fewer models predicted a Romney win (via an Obama vote
share under 50%), but those models produced more precise forecasts, with a mean confidence of
a Romney win (calculated as 1 – P[Obama Win]) of .81.6
4
http://www.kff.org/kaiserpolls/upload/8302-F.pdf
This is a measure of the probability of a model resulting in a predicted Obama vote share of
about 50%; it is a function of the point estimate and standard error of each prediction.
6
In 2004, by contrast, 6 out of 7 models in the pre-election summary published in PS forecast a
Bush victory, with a median forecast of 53.8% and an average certainty of 0.90 for a Bush
5
6
The state of the economy put Obama in a bind when it came to his campaign strategy.
He could not run on his first term economic record, which was mixed (at best), and he had to be
careful in touting his health care legislation. In effect, Obama’s campaign message had three
components. The first was a standard-issue attack on his opponent, and the campaign did a
masterful job of portraying Romney as a rapacious corporate predator and out of touch plutocrat
who had no connection with ordinary voters. The second was a strategy of tying Romney to
unpopular Republican candidates and officeholders, making sure that he was weighed down with
the more extreme Republican policy positions on social issues such as abortion and immigration.
And the third was shifting the campaign debate from a retrospective of the previous four years to
a prospective assessment of the next four. Taken together, these strategies would make the
campaign not about the economy (an issue where Romney had the advantage) but about
competing visions for the future of the middle class. It was the first time in memory that a
president ran for reelection on a platform of “things are still bad; give me another term to fix
them.”
Romney did not help himself with missteps and gaffes that suggested strongly that the
“plutocrat” charge was true. In a December 2011 primary debate in Iowa, Romney disputed
Texas Governor Rick Perry’s claim about a remark Romney made about individual health
insurance mandates. Romney offered to bet Perry over the claim. The amount? $10,000, a bet
that was pocket change to someone as wealthy as Romney (whose net worth is reported to be
around $250 million), but impossibly out of reach for most of the electorate. In a February 2012
speech to the Detroit Economic Club, Romney was proclaiming his loyalty to domestic cars, but
victory (Campbell 2004). In 2008, only 8 of 9 models forecast an Obama victory or a tie, with a
median vote share of 52% Democratic, and an average certainty of 0.86 of an Obama win
(Campbell 2008)
7
tripped up when he said his wife, Ann, “drives a couple of Cadillacs.” For many candidates this
would be a minor error. But for Romney, it reflected “a tendency to make unforced errors on the
campaign trail when making comments about his wealth. . . in an effort to emphasize that he
drives all American-made vehicles, Romney instead drew attention to the fact that his family
owns multiple cars in multiple states” (Sonmez 2012).
Perhaps the most damaging gaffe (which, to paraphrase Michael Kinsley, is defined as a
politician saying what he really thinks) was Romney’s infamous “47 percent” remark made
during a May 17 speech at a fundraiser, surreptitiously recorded and released in September:
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.
All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon
government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a
responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to
food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government
should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. . .
And so my job is not to worry about those people—I'll never convince them that
they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. 7
Even in the context of a speech to supporters, it was an astonishing argument that
denigrated and wrote off half of the electorate, and it proved enormously damaging to
Romney. Far from being an isolated and aberrant argument, "[i]t was an exaggerated
version of a claim that had become party orthodoxy" (Ponnuru 2012, 22), and was "the
moment that arguably made it impossible for [Romney] to win the election" (Podhoretz
2012, 17). It demonstrated how difficult it is to tailor messages to narrow slices of
supporters, when everything a candidate says can find its way into universal circulation.
7
The full transcript is available from Mother Jones magazine, which obtained the video.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/full-transcript-mitt-romney-secretvideo#47percent.
8
Still, Romney’s performance in the first presidential debate erased many doubts about his
earlier missteps and solidified perceptions that he could win. Obama was passive, hesitant and
distracted, and Romney was universally viewed as the winner (Landler and Baker 2012).
Romney’s support in the polls jumped, and Gallup’s tracking poll of likely voters showed
Romney leading through all of October.
Most Republicans expected to win. Romney’s internal polls apparently showed him
ahead both nationally and in enough key states to capture the 270 Electoral College votes needed
to win. As one account put it:
Across the party’s campaigns, committees and super PACs, internal polling gave
an overly optimistic read on the electorate. The Romney campaign entered the last
week of the election convinced that Colorado, Florida and Virginia were all but
won, that the race in Ohio was neck and neck and that the Republican nominee
had a legitimate shot in Pennsylvania (Burns 2012).
Romney’s remark on election day that he had only written a victory speech appears to reflect a
genuine belief that he was going to win, rather than a generic expression of confidence (Weiner
2012).
But the confidence was based on polls that were wrong, often badly, with the errors
mainly due to incorrect assumptions about the composition of the electorate. Pollsters always
have to adjust their responses to increase the likelihood that their sample is representative of the
broader population of interest. Oversampling (or under sampling) Democrats or Republicans can
lead to significant errors and there is no obvious adjustment that creates an ideal sample.
Determining who will actually vote is an additional complication: it makes little sense to ask
nonvoters whom they support, since their preferences will not be counted. Determining who will
actually vote is a surprisingly difficult task, as respondents will frequently say they will vote
9
when they have no intention of doing so. Pollsters use different methods to determine their
likely voter sample, and the details of the methodology are closely held.
Nate Silver, the New York Times blogger who was a target of critics who insisted he was
wrong in his forecasts that Obama would win, noted that
Pollsters must make a lot of choices and assumptions about turnout, wording of
questions, whether to include third-party candidates in the polls, how hard to push
“leaners” toward their preferred candidates, among other factors. These can be
difficult choices, even if one is operating in good faith in an effort to be as
accurate as possible (Silver 2012a).
Partisan criticism of polls that showed Obama ahead focused on the charges that the
partisan makeup of the samples was off, and that the polls were mistaken in their estimates of
who would vote. Most polls of registered voters were more favorable to Obama, while polls of
likely voters tended to show a closer race (or even Romney leading). Gallup’s running poll of
likely voters had Romney leading Obama throughout the October and November, often by as
much as 7 percentage points. Gallup’s poll of registered voters tended to show Obama leading,
and Romney’s lead was never more than 3 percentage points.
As often happens with the Electoral College, victory came down to a handful of swing
states where the outcome was in at least in some doubt. In 2012, forty one states were certain
wins for one or the other candidate.8 The remaining 9 states – with a total of 104 Electoral
College votes, including Florida (29 Electoral College votes), Ohio (18), North Carolina (15),
and Virginia (13) – were competitive. Romney started with a base of 191Electoral College
8
For Obama, his key base states were California (55 Electoral College votes), New York (29)
Illinois (20) and New Jersey (14); his base had. Romney’s key base states were Texas (38
Electoral College votes), Georgia (16), Tennessee (11), Indiana (11) and Missouri (10).
10
votes, and needed to nearly sweep the swing states to win the 79 votes he needed to get to 270.
Obama started with a base of 243 votes, and needed only 27 votes to win.
Election night proved to be a huge disappointment for Romney and his supporters.
Obama won reelection handily, receiving roughly 66.6 million votes to Romney’s 60.9 million, a
51%-47.3% margin. In the Electoral College, Obama won 332-206. Of the eleven states
commonly considered competitive, Obama won ten, losing only North Carolina. Obama won
Ohio comfortably (50.7%-47.7%), and Florida by a narrow but still clear 50%-49.1%. Obama
lost only two states he carried in 2008, North Carolina and Indiana. It was neither a 1984
landslide nor a 2008 rout, but it was decisive and nowhere near what Republicans anticipated.
II. Explaining the Loss
In the wake of the loss, the principal Republicans began the process of determining what
happened, often in a way that protected them from criticism that it was “their” fault. Key
Republican leaders blamed Romney, Romney advisors fired back, Vice Presidential candidate
Paul Ryan was criticized as appealing only to conservatives, Ryan pointed to “urban voters”
(read: minorities) as the key to Obama’s reelection, and Romney attributed Obama’s victory to
“gifts” he bestowed on key constituencies (Eggen, 2012; Gabriel 2012; Parker 2012; Shear et al.
2012). Moderates attributed the loss to Romney’s swerve to the right on social issues during the
presidential primaries and gaffes by prominent “Tea Party” conservative congressional
candidates. Conservatives countered that Romney was too moderate, and argued that the party
needed to move to the right; they argued that two successive centrist presidential candidates in
2008 and 2012 failed to win the White House (Kane and Helderman 2012).
11
John Podhoretz,
editor of Commentary, argued that "Obama's victory was an astonishing technical
accomplishment but in no way whatsoever a substantive one" (2012, 14), and constituted a
purely technical accomplishment of tactical and organizational effectiveness.
Many conservatives lamented the Romney campaign’s ill-fated turnout effort, which was
based on a specialized app that (in theory, at least) allowed 30,000 volunteers in key polling
places to log the names of voters. This information would be transmitted to the national
campaign headquarters, which would then tailor efforts to turn out those who had not yet voted.
It was an ambitious and technologically advanced effort that failed under the strain of massive
reliability problems, and was unusable for much of election day (Kranish 2012).
As noted earlier, the process of sorting through these competing explanations is prone to
bias through selective perception, compounded by the fact that the success or failure of these
inferences becomes known only after one or more successive elections. As Norris and
Lovenduski put it in their study of British elections,
parties may be returned to power on successive occasions for many reasons –
like the workings of the electoral system, the personal popularity of charismatic
leaders or the impact of media campaign coverage – even when the policy mood
is moving against them. But in general, if seriously lagging or leading public
opinion on important issues, politicians face the threat of a serious electoral
penalty (2004, 89).
An early theme, echoed in a Republican National Committee presentation on the results,
was that Romney almost won, and that only 334,000 votes in four states would have given
Romney an Electoral College victory. Wins in these states would have given Romney the 64
Electoral College votes he needed to reach 270 votes. This is an appealing argument for the
12
vanquished, as it deflects blame toward turnout and organization, and away from more basic
questions about a party’s foundational appeal.
In fact, a shift of about half this total would have changed the result. Table 2 shows the
number of votes that would have to shift to from Obama to Romney (equal to one-half of the
difference +1 in each state) to defeat the president. A shift of 166,958 Obama votes to Romney,
or only 0.92% of the total votes cast in the race, would have resulted in Romney winning the
White House.
This calculation is accurate, and may be a comforting thought, but is misleading in the
sense that it overstates the closeness of the election and has little relevance to understanding the
actual outcome. A landslide election loss, to be sure, provides information that a narrow one
does not, and the diagnosis for the Republicans from 2012 would be very different if Romney
had lost by 10 million votes. But is also true that in any reasonably close presidential election, a
shift of a small number of votes in key states would have altered the outcome, because of the
Electoral College. In 1968, a shift of just over 53,000 votes in three states would have thrown
the election to the House of Representatives; in 1976, a shift of 9,246 votes in 2 states would
have reelected Ford (Longley and Pierce 1999, 64-76). But even in the 1992 election, in which
Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush by nearly 6 million votes and by 370-168 in the
Electoral College, a shift of fewer than 288,000 votes would have reversed the result.9
As a counterfactual, this type of analysis requires heroic assumptions about how those
votes could have been obtained. One cannot assume that those votes would have been easy to
mobilize, perhaps if only ORCA had worked. Candidates, parties, and independent groups had
9
The argument cuts both ways, as well. In 2004, a shift of 59,300 votes in Ohio would have
elected John Kerry.
13
already devoted billions of dollars and months of effort to identify, persuade, and mobilize
voters, and those efforts were concentrated in close states where they would do the most good.
In 2012, virtually all of the visits, organizing, advertising, and mobilization efforts occurred in 11
swing states,10 and almost none in large noncompetitive ones.11 Given the scope of the existing
effort, it is not clear where Romney could have found the necessary votes, or what strategic
choices would have increased the likelihood of identifying or persuading them.
More importantly, the counterfactual assumes information that did not exist at the time
crucial strategic choices were made. There was no feasible way of knowing in advance that the
election would come down to a few hundred thousand votes in a handful of states, or what the
specific distribution of those votes would be. In the absence of that information, campaigns
typically exert as much effort as they can where they forecast it would do the most good. This is
complicated somewhat by the fact that the Romney campaign was actually operating with
inaccurate polling information about how the candidate was actually doing in Wisconsin,
Colorado, and Nevada (all swing states that Obama won comfortably), and it is perhaps possible
that better information might have led to a shift of resources away from those states toward
Florida, Ohio, and Virginia (states where Obama won with far narrower margins). Nevertheless,
even if the campaign had perfect information, the counterfactual still requires an assumption that
some additional action by the Romney campaign – a targeted message, a more efficient get out
10
Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina,
Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin. These states have about 25% of U.S. population.
11
The campaigns devoted almost no resources to California, New York, Texas, Illinois, or
Pennsylvania. Any ads seen there were spillovers from media markets in adjoining competitive
states.
14
the vote effort, better debate performances, another campaign event – could have made the
difference.12
The available evidence, post-election, suggests that these post-hoc explanations of
Romney’s defeat are all incorrect. While it is possible that better GOTV effort or campaign
strategy may have altered the outcome, data from exit polling – an imperfect tool but far more
useful than the suppositions and “what ifs” that often dominate post-election theorizing –show
that Romney’s loss was due to more fundamental issues. The question is not one of what
Romney could have done, but what Republicans must do to remain nationally competitive.
Consider the fact that since 1988 the Republican presidential candidate has won the
popular vote only once, in 2004 when George W. Bush won by 1.2 million votes. Clinton won
in 1992 and 1996, Gore won the popular vote in 2000, and Obama won in 2008 and 2012. The
last time a party was 1-5 in presidential popular votes was 1952, when Eisenhower's victory
interrupted five straight Democratic wins. Of course, Eisenhower’s win demonstrates that of
winning and losing streaks are hardly permanent. But the support Romney received from
various demographic groups suggests that it may take more than an attractive candidate to
disrupt the current pattern.
For the last 50 years, Republican presidential candidates have drawn the bulk of their
votes from White voters. This has often been enough to secure victory without much support
from minority constituencies, but no longer is, as White voters comprise a shrinking part of the
electorate. White voters made up only 72% of the electorate in 2012, as estimated via exit polls,
12
And although it may be obvious, Romney was not the only actor in these scenarios. The
Obama campaign was also engaged in an effort to obtain votes, so it is a mistake to think that
Republicans were looking for votes in a static environment. Every effort by Romney made
would certainly have been matched by a countervailing effort by Democrats.
15
down from 87% in 1992. Nearly all the growth in the non-White electorate has occurred among
Hispanics (now 10%, up from 2% in 1992) and Asians (3% in 2012, up from under 1% in 1996),
along with higher turnout among African Americans (13% of the electorate in in 2008 and 2012,
up from 8% in 1996). Long-range projections show the Hispanic population growing to 30% of
the population by 2050 (Teixeira 2010).
One way to analyze the effects of a changing electorate is using exit polling to examine
the net contribution of different demographic groups to the Republican Party’s popular vote.
Table 3 contains these calculations for each presidential election since 1980. For each major
demographic group – Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians – I use exit poll data to calculate
that group’s contribution to a party’s overall vote, by multiplying a group’s share of the
electorate by the percentage of that group voting Democratic or Republican. For example, in
2012 White voters made up 72% of the electorate [last column in table 3 (a)]. Table 3 (b) shows
that in 2012, 59% of Whites voted for Romney, and 39% for Obama (the remaining 2% voted for
other candidates). Consequently, 0.72*0.59 = 42.5% of the electorate was in the Republican
column [table 3 (c)], and 28.1% of the electorate voted Democratic [table 3 (d)]. Hispanics made
up 10% of the electorate in 2012, and voted Democratic by a 71%-27% margin.13 Therefore,
0.1*0.27= 2.7% of the electorate was in the Republican column, and 7.1% was in the Democratic
column. Adding up the contribution for all groups gives an approximate percentage of the
13
This may underestimate Obama’s support among Hispanics. An election-eve national poll
conducted by Stanford political scientist Gary Segura concluded that Hispanics favored Obama
by an even larger 75%-23% margin:
http://www.latinodecisions.com/files/9313/5233/8455/Latino_Election_Eve_Poll__Crosstabs.pdf.
16
overall vote percentage that each party received in that election.14 In 2012, these calculations
resulted in Republicans receiving 46.7% of the overall vote (not just the two-party vote, as the
exit polls show data for third party candidates), and Democrats 49.5%. This is close to the actual
vote percentages received by Romney and Obama, (47.3% and 51.0%, respectively).
Several things stand out from these calculations. First, Republicans did as well or better
among White voters in 2012 as they had in any election since 1984, when they received 64% of
the White vote in the Reagan landslide.
The 59% the GOP received in 2012 is the same
percentage as they received in 1988, and higher than in either 2004 (when they received 58%) or
1980 (when they received 56%).
Except under truly exceptional circumstances, it is hard to see
how Republicans could do better than this. Second, because White voters make up a smaller
share of the electorate, that 59% of that vote produced a smaller share of the electorate going for
the Republicans. In 1980 56% of the White vote for Republicans produced, by itself, enough
votes to defeat Jimmy Carter (49.8% to 41.1%), because whites were 89% of the electorate. In
2012, a higher share of the White vote (59%) produced a much smaller total vote percentage
(42.5%). While Republicans could win through 1988 entirely on the basis of their support among
Whites, they can no longer do so.
An additional way to show the overall effect of these demographic changes is to
calculate the net vote from each demographic group for the Democrats and Republicans. This
measure is simply the Democratic vote subtracted from the Republican vote for each, resulting in
the net effect from each group: positive nets show a pro-Republican vote by that group, and
14
Note that these figures are expressed as a percentage of the total electorate, not the percentage
of each party’s vote made up of that group. The method can be applied to any demographic
whose voting behavior is identifiable – White men; married Black women; unmarried Hispanics.
17
negative a pro-Democratic. This calculation can be difficult to interpret, as the results depend
on both the size of a particular demographic group and that group’s support for the party. Over
time, even if the party’s support among the groups remained identical, the contribution would
change as its share of the electorate grew or shrank. But it is a way of analyzing how a party’s
overall success is shaped by support levels among different groups and how that support evolves
over time.
Table 3 (f) shows the results; adding the results for each year will produce an
approximation of the final percentage difference between the parties, with a positive net showing
a Republican win, and a negative a Democratic win. A clear result is that in 2012 Republicans,
net, did better among White voters than they have in any year since 1988: the 14.4% net is
larger than even the 13.1% net in 2004, the last time the GOP won the popular vote. And yet
that net vote, which would have been more than enough to win in 2004, was far short in 2012.
The problem for the Republicans is that nonwhite voters were net -17.1% against them
(producing the overall -2.8% margin of defeat). For the Republicans to overcome this net vote
among nonwhites – that is, to achieve a +17.1 net among white voters – Romney would have had
to receive at least 61% among White voters, a percentage that is probably unattainable.
Table 1 shows this graphically. The bars above zero – in blue – show the net effect of
White voters. The bars below zero show the effect of other demographic groups. The black
diamonds show the overall net effect, which closely approximates the overall margin in the
popular vote: above zero means a Republican win, below, a Democratic win.
The unmistakable trend shows that over the past 30 years Republicans have done
progressively worse at obtaining the results of minority voters. Even Asian voters, who voted
18
Republican in 1992 and 1996, have become a reliably Democratic group. The size of the bars
are yet another problem for the Republican Party. Hispanics, which were a net -0.2% in 1980
because they were only 2% of the electorate, are now a net -4.4% and growing, both because
they are an increasing share of the electorate and an increasingly Democratic one. In 2012,
Democrats won the Hispanic vote by a 71%-27% margin, a gap that was larger only in the 1996
elections when the Democrats won this vote 72%-21%. More ominously, as Republican support
among White voters went up in 2012 compared to 2000-2008. Its support among nonwhite
voters has gone down.
There are many other ways of sorting the electorate, and many demographics that
continue to support Republicans, especially evangelical Christians, small town and rural voters,
the wealthy, and voters in the South. But these smaller slices largely overlap with race or are too
small to provide much prospect of expanding the party’s appeal.15
The causes of this apparent hardening of opposition to Republicans everywhere except its
base are clear enough. Perceptions among nonwhites of Republican hostility to civil rights and
immigrants, a strong conservative shift among Republicans at all levels of government, sharply
conservative positions on social issues. Republicans insist that these views are unfair, and often
express exasperation at the failure of high-profile minorities such as Colin Powell, Condoleezza
Rice, and Marco Rubio to create any goodwill among nonwhite voters.
Party coalitions change, of course, and events could easily change these attachments, just
as earlier arguments that population migration would lead to a permanent Republican advantage
15
For example, Romney won the vote of those with an income of $100,000 or more, 54%-44%.
But that demographic is only 28% of the electorate, and is overwhelmingly white. And while
upper income voters are moderately Republican, among the 41% of voters earning less than
$50,000 , Romney lost by a 38%-60% margin.
19
in the Electoral College proved to be flawed (Destler 1996). The 1994 Republican midterm
sweep, which produced their first congressional majorities in four decades, occurred amid
arguments that they had become a permanent minority party, and led to observations that a
conservative realignment had just taken place (neither position was accurate).
These demographic results, moreover, do not provide guidance about how the Republican
Party can broaden its appeal among these groups, or whether the answer involves policy shifts or
better messaging. Or, as the National Review put it, perhaps both:
Republicans from the top to the bottom of the ticket did little to make the case that
conservative policies would make the broad mass of the public better off. It
wasn’t a theme of the convention in Tampa, for example, or a consistent theme in
Republican ads. . . Until conservatives devise a domestic agenda, and a way to
sell it, that links small-government principles to attractive results, they are going
to have a hard time improving their standing with women, Latinos, white men, or
young people.
III. Prospects and Possibilities for Responding
A party that receives nearly all its votes from a shrinking demographic group, and is
unable to expand beyond its base, risks becoming a “rump” party unable to compete at the
national level. Similar observations arose after earlier landslide losses in the 1964, 1972, and
1984 presidential elections, all of which generated pressure to modify the existing party
processes and positions. Though 2012 was not a defeat on those scales, the ongoing
demographic and political changes that have produced one GOP popular vote victory (2004)
since 1988 suggest a deeper problem with the party’s appeal. 16 What confronts the Republican
16
This is hardly a new observation; Judis and Teixeira (2002) saw this coming over ten years
ago, but they argued that the GOP’s demographic problem is deeper, extending to women,
professionals, and even erstwhile “Reagan Democrats.”
20
party is not a "critical election" or a realignment of party coalitions stemming from a crisis that
shakes voters loose from their existing attachments. It is rather a gradual shift in the makeup of
the electorate and increasingly solidified preferences among the main groups that comprise it.
These broader (and slower) forces do not provide clear guidance as to what the
Republican Party should respond, even assuming for the moment that there is a unitary party that
could make and implement any decisions. The obvious initial answer is that the party must
moderate, and adopt less extreme and more centrist positions on key policy issues and goals, as
Ponnuru (2008) suggested after Obama’s victory of McCain. A broad theoretical literature
extending back to Downs (1957) has produced equilibria showing under ideal conditions
political parties in 2-party electoral systems tend to converge to the center. This is what typically
happens in parliamentary systems when party’s shift in response to changes in voter preferences
and behavior. But moderation is not the same thing as convergence, and parties also face
“centrifugal forces” that push their positions and candidates apart. Parties need to distinguish
themselves from the others, so that voters have a choice.
One often heard refrain is that the Republican Party must adopt a more centrist platform
on immigration, because the party’s hard-line enforcement stance, and opposition to policies that
offer a “path to citizenship,” explain why support among Hispanics dropped to the lowest level
since 1996. Matt Rhoads, Romney’s campaign manager, acknowledged that Romney moved to
the right on immigration during the primaries to fight off a challenge by Texas Governor Rick
Perry, who at one point was Romney’s main rival, and that the shift hurt the candidate (Zeleny
2012). In December 2012, Former President George W. Bush urged Republicans to soften their
party’s stance on the issue (Preston 2012).
21
But such a shift – even if genuine – would likely be seen and would certainly be
portrayed as a cynical and transparent ploy designed solely to attract votes without making any
substantive change to policies, a matter of pandering rather than of sincerity. The effect,
moreover, would not be immediate, as research on party moderation has found that when parties
moderate their platforms in response to election losses, subsequent gains usually occur after the
next election (Adams and Somer-Topcu 2009). That change is also risky, because stalwarts may
reject changes that shift the party’s foundations.
Political parties have certain policy ideals. Any movement away from these policy
preferences should increase uncertainty and risks about the outcomes of change
because parties do not know how voters, activists, or donors would react to
change, or whether the party would lose its credibility in the eyes of voters
(Somer-Topcu 2009, 238).
In cases where “a more radical form of ideological repositioning is seen as required. . .
adaptations can prompt a sense of betrayal” ( Buckler and Dolowitz 2012, 581). Some
conservatives have already started to push back against any such modification of the party’s
stance, on immigration insisting that such pressure merely “represents opportunism by those
who have always favored a more accommodating approach” (Kane and Helderman 2012).
What is less clear is how such a shift in policy or process could be instituted. Parties
may be more powerful now than they were in the 1980s, but in their current form they are more
of a financial and organizational resource than an ideological one, having lost their most
important power: control over who runs under the party label. An important consequence of
party structure is that reform is no longer a top-down process in which party leaders make
decisions about direction and positions which are then imposed upon the party. It is no longer
possible to do that, since parties are a loose amalgam of different constituencies with no strong
centralizing force (other than a general desire to see policy moved in their desired direction). In
22
addition, there is often a dispute as to who the party leaders are, and candidates and voters have
the final say. This feature is one reason why the academic literature on the effects of electoral
defeats is based largely on studies of parliamentary systems, where parties have more centralized
control over their platforms, officeholders, and candidates (Adams and Somer-Topcu 2009; Fell
2009; Norris and Lovenduski 2004; Powell 2000; Quinn 2012; Somer-Topcu 2009).
Instead, changes must emerge from a broad acceptance of the necessity of change, and
willingness by the different components of the party coalition to accept those changes for the
sake of winning. In practice, this usually means that more ideological committed partisans have
to accept a more moderate nominee, or agree to processes that are more likely to produce a more
moderate winner. Even if the leaders of the Republican Party understood that an extremely
socially conservative candidate like former Senator Rick Santorum or Congresswomen Michelle
Bachman (both darlings of the most conservative wing of the parry) had no chance to win in the
general election, they would have been powerless to do anything about if those candidates had
sufficient electoral support. The nominee would be chosen by a congeries of primary voters, not
all of who were even nominally Republicans.17 Such systems are far more likely to produce
candidates whose views are closer to those of ideologically extreme primary voters than to more
centrist general election voters (Owen and Grofman 2006), and complicate the problem of
17
In 2012, only 58% of Republican primary delegates – the people who would ultimately select
the party’s nominee – were allocated in closed primaries where only registered Republicans
could vote. The remaining delegates were chosen in either open primaries in which anyone
could vote (even Democrats), or semi open primaries where registered Independents could vote.
In open primaries Democrats, who did not need to vote in any primaries as President Obama was
essentially unchallenged, could vote in Republican primaries in order to support candidates who
had less chance to win in the general election. In Wisconsin’s open primary, 11% of the voters
in the GOP primary were Democrats, and they were unusually supportive if Rick Santorum:
polls showed that they favored Santorum by a 44% to 24% margin, while Republicans favored
Romney 51%-37%. Santorum’s vote among those who strongly opposed the Tea Party
movement was 40%, higher than the 38% support he received from voters who strongly
supported the Tea Party.
23
responding when parties lack any central control over what candidates actually propose during
campaigns. Unlike parties in parliamentary systems, "American parties. . . lack an
institutionalized process by which out-party policy development takes place. This raises the
related question of who in the party is going to engage in policy development and where in the
party is policy development going to occur?" (Hale 1995, 209)
Here, the experience with the two previous Democratic Party reforms – the McGovernFraser Commission and the Democratic Leadership Council – is instructive. Both were
prompted by concerns that the Democratic Party lost elections because it did not adequately
represent the electorate or the party’s rank and file.
In 1968, the debacle of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago led to a complete
reorganization of the Democratic primary process. The convention was marred by police
violence against protesters, disputes over the Vietnam War, and conflicts over the nomination of
Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had not run in a single primary but whose nomination
was engineered by party leaders (Polsby 1983, 16-36). As McGovern (1970, 41) described the
problem, “[t]he Convention because the shame of the Democratic Party, and in all likelihood
assured its defeat in the November following.” Humphrey’s defeat was not the only motivation
of reformers: the primary system was almost entirely unresponsive to the antiwar sentiment of
many voters, and despite significant mobilization for antiwar candidates Eugene McCarthy and
Robert F. Kennedy, Humphrey’s nomination was secured though a process “delegate selection
by party bosses, small committees, and rigged conventions” that had started as much as four
years before the convention (McGovern 1970, 44). The reforms adopted via the Commission on
Party Structure and Delegate Selection (the McGovern-Fraser Commission) open up the
Democrats' nomination process to an unprecedented degree: nearly all delegates would be
24
selected in primaries or caucuses, and state delegations had to have proportional representation
of women and minorities.
These changes had a dramatic effect on the Democratic nomination, and McGovern
pulled the Democratic Party to the left as he easily captured the nomination using his superior
understanding of the new rules. The 1972 platform was unabashedly liberal, supporting busing,
gun control, and amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders, and expanded welfare programs including a
guaranteed income for all Americans, (Baer 2000, 24-25). The result was an historic landslide:
Nixon won the popular vote 61%-38%, and 520 Electoral College votes; McGovern received one
of lowest shares of the popular vote in any presidential election in the modern Two-Party era.
Subsequent reforms over the next two decades were driven by a desire to restore the influence of
party professionals and elected officials through the creation of superdelegates within the
Democratic party (in place by 1984), and to reward moderate candidates by concentrating
southern primaries early in the season (Super Tuesday, in place in 1988).
The Democratic Leadership Council was organized in 1985 by moderate Democratic
legislators and Governors who were concerned about the 1984 landslide and what they saw as
the Party’s continued drift leftward and a focus on constituencies rather than ideas (Baer 2000,
65-67). Over the next decade, the DLC functioned both as a policy incubator that offered new
approaches to substantive issues, and a reformist movement that proposed “fundamental changes
in the party’s organization and operating procedures” (Baer 2000, 69). Although initially some
traditional Democratic groups opposed its organization, fearing that it cause a rift inside the
party, the DLC eventually was able to work within existing party structures. Clinton won two
presidential elections as the archetype of a DLC "New Democrat" in 1992 (Hale 1995),
25
supported the death penalty and welfare reform, and declared that "the era of big government is
over" in his 1996 State of the Union address.
The DLC shows that in the contemporary era of party decentralization, reforms have
emerged from entrepreneurs within the party who are able to propose ideas that broaden support
in the electorate. Those entrepreneurs have also generally been centrists who were convinced
that the dominant party positions no longer reflected what voters wanted, and who succeeded not
by raw political power but by persuasion and electoral demonstrations that they could win.
What we do not yet know is whether the demographic trends noted here constitute an
existential threat to the Republican party,18 present a problem that can be addressed with
persuasion and a better message, or require careful balancing of core principles against a
modified agenda that has broader appeals. In any case, the answer won't be known until the next
presidential election, when voters will have the last word.
18
Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex) put it this way in post-election interview: "In not too many years,
Texas could switch from being all Republican to all Democrat . . .If that happens, no Republican
will ever again win the White House. New York and California are for the foreseeable future
unalterably Democrat. If Texas turns bright blue, the Electoral College math is simple. We won't
be talking about Ohio, we won't be talking about Florida or Virginia, because it won't matter. If
Texas is bright blue, you can't get to two-seventy electoral votes. The Republican Party would
cease to exist. We would become like the Whig Party. Our kids and grandkids would study how
this used to be a national political party. 'They had Conventions, they nominated Presidential
candidates. They don't existanymore.' " (Lizza 2012).
26
Table 1 – Forecasting Models
Forecaster
Name of Model
Predicted
Obama % of
Two Party vote
Certainty
of Obama
Plurality
Cúzan
Fiscal Model
46.9
0.11
Berry & Bickers
State Level Economic Model
47.1
0.23
Hibbs
Bread and Peace Model
47.5
0.10
Holbrook
National Conditions and Incumbency
47.9
0.27
Lewis-Beck & Tien
Jobs Model and the Proxy Model
48.2
0.23
Montgomery, Hollenbach, &
Ward
Ensemble Bayesian Model Averaging
(EBMA)
50.3
0.6
Abramowitz (Median)
Time for Change Model
50.6
0.67
Klarner
State Level Presidential Forecast
Model
51.2
0.57
Campbell
Trial Heat/Convention Bump Model
51.3
0.67
Jerôme & Jerôme-Speziari
State Level Political Economy Model
51.6
0.64
Erikson & Wlezien
Leading Economic Indicators and the
Polls
52.6
0.8
Norpoth & Bednarczuk
Primary Model
53.2
0.88
Lockerbie
Expectations Model
53.8
0.57
27
R
win
D
win
Table 2 – Votes Required to Change Result
State
Electoral
College
Votes
Obama
Vote
Romney
Vote
Absolute
Difference
% Margin
of Victory
Vote Shift from
Obama to
Romney Needed
Florida
29
4,236,032
4,162,174
73,858
0.9%
36,960
New
Hampshire
4
368,529
327,870
40,659
5.8%
20,330
Ohio
18
2,697,260
2,593,779
103,481
1.9%
51,741
Virginia
13
1,905,528
1,789,618
115,910
3.0%
57,956
Totals
64
9,207,349
8,873,441
333,908
--
166,958
28
Table 3 - Demographic Contributions to Party Vote Shares
(a) Demographic Composition of The Electorate
1980
1984
1988
1992
White
89%
87%
85%
87%
Black
10%
9%
10%
8%
Hispanic
2%
2%
3%
2%
Asian
1%
1996
83%
10%
5%
1%
2000
81%
10%
6%
2%
2004
77%
11%
8%
2%
2008
74%
13%
9%
2%
2012
72%
13%
10%
3%
(b) Republican Share of Vote
1980
1984
White
56%
64%
Black
11%
9%
Hispanic
35%
37%
Asian
-
1988
59%
12%
30%
-
1992
40%
10%
25%
55%
1996
46%
12%
21%
48%
2000
54%
8%
35%
41%
2004
58%
11%
44%
41%
2008
55%
4%
31%
35%
2012
59%
6%
27%
26%
(c) Democratic Share of Vote
1980
1984
White
36%
35%
Black
85%
90%
Hispanic
56%
62%
Asian
-
1988
40%
86%
69%
-
1992
39%
83%
61%
31%
1996
43%
84%
72%
43%
2000
42%
90%
62%
54%
2004
41%
88%
53%
58%
2008
43%
95%
67%
62%
2012
39%
93%
71%
73%
(d) Republican Vote (a) x (b)
1980
1984
White
49.8%
55.7%
Black
1.1%
0.8%
Hispanic
0.4%
0.7%
Asian
TOTAL
51.3%
57.2%
1988
50.2%
1.2%
0.9%
52.3%
1992
34.8%
0.8%
0.5%
0.6%
36.7%
1996
38.2%
1.2%
1.1%
0.5%
40.9%
2000
43.7%
0.8%
2.1%
0.8%
47.5%
2004
44.7%
1.2%
3.5%
0.9%
50.3%
2008
40.7%
0.5%
2.8%
0.7%
44.7%
2012
42.5%
0.8%
2.7%
0.8%
46.7%
(e) Democratic Vote (a) x (c)
1980
1984
White
32.0%
30.5%
Black
8.5%
8.1%
Hispanic
0.6%
1.2%
Asian
TOTAL
41.1%
39.8%
1988
34.0%
8.6%
2.1%
44.7%
1992
33.9%
6.6%
1.2%
0.3%
42.1%
1996
35.7%
8.4%
3.6%
0.4%
48.1%
2000
34.0%
9.0%
3.7%
1.1%
47.8%
2004
31.6%
9.7%
4.2%
1.1%
46.6%
2008
31.8%
12.4%
6.0%
1.2%
51.4%
2012
28.1%
12.1%
7.1%
2.2%
49.5%
(f) Net Republican Vote Shares (d) - (e)
1980
1984
1988
1992
1996
2000
2004
2008
2012
White
Black
Hispanic
Asian
0.9%
-5.8%
-0.7%
0.2%
2.5%
-7.2%
-2.6%
0.1%
9.7%
-8.2%
-1.6%
-0.3%
13.1%
-8.5%
-0.7%
-0.2%
8.9%
-11.8%
-3.2%
-0.5%
14.4%
-11.3%
-4.4%
-1.4%
17.8%
-7.4%
-0.2%
-
25.2%
-7.3%
-0.5%
-
16.2%
-7.4%
-1.2%
-
29
Figure 1: Demographic Groups and GOP Vote Totals
Net Contribution to Republican Vote Percentage
30.0%
25.0%
Favors Republicans
20.0%
15.0%
10.0%
Asian
Hispanic
5.0%
Black
White
0.0%
1980
1984
1988
1992
1996
-5.0%
-10.0%
Favors Democrats
-15.0%
-20.0%
30
2000
2004
2008
2012
Total
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