How did President Obama manage to defeat the GOP in 2012 despite being the first incumbent President in history to win less votes in his reelection campaign than in his first? Superior campaign tactics and help from a sympathetic media were the primary culprits according to a CPAC panel Friday morning titled “CSI Washington, D.C.: November 2012 Autopsy.”
The American Spectator’s John Fund and the Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone discussed the Obama campaign’s “phenomenal” microtargeting and voter outreach strategy, which used everything from Americans’ magazine subscriptions to past charitable contributions to identify and reach potential voters.
Barone pointed out that this microtargeting strategy enabled Obama to increase turnout in key states, primarily from Hispanics, Blacks and urban voters, even as overall national turnout for Obama was down 3.5 million votes from 2008. “Obama was able to find voters that have never been found before,” explained Fund.
An increasingly subservient media also aided Obama in negatively defining Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. According to panelist and Pulitzer prize-winning political cartoonist Michael Ramirez, the media helped to shape campaign messages in Obama’s favor. It goes without saying that big stories that might have hurt the Obama campaign, like Solyndra, Benghazi and a string of bad news related to Obamacare’s implementation, were mostly ignored by mainstream media outlets.
Former New York Congresswoman Ann Marie Buerkle, who narrowly won her northern New York district in 2010 before being defeated in 2012, bemoaned the Democrats’ successful (and phony) “War on Women” message. Incredibly, a media aiding and abetting the Obama campaign’s key talking point managed to paint Buerkle, who graduated from law school after having six children, as “anti-women.”
How can Republicans move forward from the stinging 2012 defeat?
The panel advised that Republicans must publicize the contrasts between Republican states and Democrat-controlled states like California and Michigan which have catastrophic budgetary problems. There are currently 25 states which are governed by GOP governors and GOP controlled legislatures, many of which have been pursuing aggressive conservative reforms.
Finally, the group addressed the minority demographic problems of the GOP. For example, while George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole both won the Asian-American vote in their Presidential races, Mitt Romney only managed to woo 26 percent of that demographic. Republicans’ failings with African-Americans and Hispanics in 2012 are also well-documented (and much more publicized).
While the panel didn’t get into policy specifics, the panelists pointed out that Republicans must make a greater effort to court minority voters, but with an eye towards raising them up using conservative principles rather cynically pandering to minority groups just to earn votes near election-time. “Our motivations must be pure,” explained Congresswoman Buerkle.
The 2013 off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey offer Republicans a prime opportunity to experiment with new new strategies and new outreach efforts.
