Why Did Mitt Romney Lose The 2012 Presidential Election?

Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/11/07/why- did- mitt- romney- lose- the- 2012- presidential- election/ November 30, 2012

Move up http://i.forbesimg.com t Move down America is not especially f ar right of cent er, is get t ing less Mark Rogowsky, Internet whit e, and is slowly, but surely, digging out of t he worst Entrepeneur, @maxrogo recession since t he Great Depression. The public, most specifically in the battleground states, but most probably overall (by a slightly smaller margin than the re-election of George W. Bush), decided to stick with the president for another term. Whites were 76.3% of the voters in 2008; early exit polls have it falling to 72% in 2012. Among them, 61% of men and 55% of women voted for Mitt Romney. President Obama won Latinos, African-Americans, and all others by larger margins than Romney won among even white men. (The lowest was Latino men, who chose the president 63-35.) I allude to this trend in my current Forbes post (Congrats On Your Vote, Too Bad It Probably Didnt Count Forbes (onforb.es)), but this is demographic determinism. The Republican Party is about tight borders, self-deportation of illegal aliens, restrictions on voting rights, and a number of other things that are killing it among minority voters. Romney did nothing to help in this matter. Hes rich. Hes very white, having come from Utah, being Mormon, being a country-club businessman, etc. Let me be clear, I believe hes a good man and has achieved many great things, but I am describing how this race was run and lost. Before the first debate in Denver, candidate Romney had shifted right to win the Republican primaries. He was a severe conservative, moving his positions on abortion, immigration, climate change, etc. to suit the more conservative primary electorate. When the Denver debate started, Romney came out with a defense of regulation after the GOP spent four years blaming Obama for wrecking the economy with too many of those. And the candidate whose advisers said could take an Etch-a-Sketch after the primaries did just that. Suddenly, Moderate Mitt re-emerged. Not quite the man who governed Massachusetts, but someone much closer than wed seen. Someone who I believe might have lost the primaries to Rick Santorum (the last conservative standing), but had he been able to campaign that way for a year, might have won the election. Instead, we got another Massachusetts candidate who could rightly be called a flip flopper (and one arguably far more flippy than the last guy). Romnesia as a meme didnt decide this election, but the concept stuck, in part due to its legitimacy. And finally, while it wasnt just Gov. Romney with the affliction of forgetting, the Republicans tried to convince America to forget how we got in this economic mess in the first place. The voters by a reasonable majority blamed President Bushs policies and administration. They looked past a topline 7.9% unemployment rate and saw the 5+ million jobs created since the bottom of the trough as evidence of an improving economy. Economic growth is real, even if too slow for anyones satisfaction. And while Romney promised to create 12 million new jobs, a supposedly unsophisticated electorate somehow intuited that was basically whats expected without much good happening. (Source: Fact Check: Romneys 12

million jobs promise (washingtonpost.com)). Read this over at Slate if you have a moment: Whoever Wins the Election Will Get To Preside Over a Growing Economy and Look Like a Genius (slate.com). Excerpt here:

Consider that over the course of George W. Bushs eight years in office, net employment increased by about a million jobs while weve added a bit more than half a million (washingtonpost.com) in Obamas first term. By historical standards, thats abysmal. More than 11 million jobs were added in each of Bill Clintons two terms in office.

Theres no reason to think 2013-2016 will see the kind of super-fast growth we saw in the late-1930s or mid-1980s, but its overwhelmingly likely that the next four or five yearswill look a lot better than the past four or five. That means whoever wins the election is likely to get a similar halo,

The American people trust Obama to more or less stay the course and didnt believe Romney was going to do much better. Again, this is nothing to crow about, unless, of course, you want to compare us to the UK. Our financial crisis on balance was much worse, yet our recovery has been much less horrendous. Compare us to the Brits for example: Note that these curves are both below a normal recovery, which is consistent with much research that shows unwinding from a financial crisis/de-leveraging recession is harder than average. In the U.S., the slope of the curve is very nearly normal. In the UK, the slope of the curve is disastrous. Generally, I love the English, but thank goodness we did it differently from them (Source: Now, about the UKs recovery (ft.com)). Relat ed: Mitt Romney Supporters React To President Obama's Reelection