After Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in 2012, an election that Romney and the Republicans thought they would win and were so confident that they were shocked by the result, the party did what they called an ‘autopsy’ about the loss and what they needed to do to win in the future. Their conclusion? The party’s policies were fine but they needed to make a greater effort to get their message out and to be more inclusive.
While unveiling the 100-page report at the National Press Club today, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said he wanted the report, or autopsy, to be “honest” and “raw,” stressing the message of inclusion to Americans who might not be on board with all the party’s policies.
“Our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren’t inclusive; we were behind in both data and digital; our primary and debate process needed improvement,” Priebus said of Mitt Romney and the GOP’s 2012 loss. “There’s no one solution. There’s a long list of them.”
The report, called the “Growth and Opportunity Project,” lays out an extensive plan the RNC believes will lead the party to victory with an extensive outreach to women, African-American, Asian, Hispanic and gay voters. Among the plans: hiring paid outreach staffers across the country in a $10 million push that begins right away; backing “comprehensive immigration reform”.
…Priebus noted that the party’s policies are fundamentally sound but require a softer tone and broader outreach, include a stronger push for African-American, Latino, Asian, women and gay voters.
“To be clear, our principles our sound, our principles are not old rusty thoughts in some book,” Priebus said, but the “report notes the way we communicate our principles isn’t resonating widely enough.”
Well, we know how that turned out. Trump became the nominee and ran on appealing to the worst elements of angry white male voters. And he won. Whether he won because of that message or because Hillary Clinton ran a poor campaign we may never know.
Now the party has come out with a new autopsy prepared by Trump’s chief pollster Tony Fabrizio and it places the blame squarely at Trump’s feet.
The post-mortem, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO, says the former president suffered from voter perception that he wasn’t honest or trustworthy and that he was crushed by disapproval of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. And while Trump spread baseless accusations of ballot-stuffing in heavily Black cities, the report notes that he was done in by hemorrhaging support from white voters.
…The findings are based on an analysis of exit polling in 10 states. Five of them — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — are states that Trump lost after winning them in 2016. The other five — Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas — are states that Trump won in both elections.
The report zeroes in on an array of demographics where Trump suffered decisive reversals in 2020, including among white seniors, the same group that helped to propel him to the White House. The autopsy says that Trump saw the “greatest erosion with white voters, particularly white men,” and that he “lost ground with almost every age group.” In the five states that flipped to Biden, Trump’s biggest drop-off was among voters aged 18-29 and 65 and older.
Suburbanites — who bolted from Trump after 2016 — also played a major role. The report says that the former president suffered a “double-digit erosion” with “White College educated voters across the board.”
…Trump’s personal behavior, the autopsy makes clear, contributed to his defeat. “Biden had a clear edge over POTUS on being seen as honest & trustworthy,” Fabrizio writes.
Trump’s response to the pandemic was also critical. The autopsy says that coronavirus registered as the top issue among voters, and that Biden won those voters by a nearly 3-to-1 margin. A majority registered disapproval of Trump’s handling of the virus.
Most voters said they prioritized battling the coronavirus over reopening the economy, even as the president put a firm emphasis on the latter. And roughly 75 percent of voters — most of whom favored Biden — said they favored public mask-wearing mandates.
The autopsy was completed on December 20th and given to Trump’s top advisors just before Joe Biden’s inauguration. It is not clear if Trump has seen this autopsy but it is clear that he had no input into it. It is impossible for him to conceive that he was responsible for his defeat. In his mind he is like Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way and ran a perfect campaign and that the victory he was entitled to was stolen from him. I suspect that his advisors have not shown it to him for fear of him going into a rage at yet another ‘betrayal’
So this autopsy will end up in the trash. He will refuse to accept it and if he does not run again, the party will likely conclude that a different candidate will not have those same negatives.
Denial is so much easier than making changes.
All had with a small margin and were predicted to have a small margin….. Except that for some odd reason, they left out Nevada (Biden), even though it was closer than Michigan, as well as Nebraska-2 (Biden) and Maine-2 (Trump). Not that it makes a big difference, but Maine-2 was also closer than both Ohio and Iowa. So, I mean, it’s obviously not a thorough analysis of all of the states’ elections, but short of doing that (which would be more work), why did they make that particular choice?
Democrats should be asking themselves some hard questions too, but they don’t.
The presidential race should not have been close at all, in either 2016 or 2020. Why was it? And they lost 13 seats in the House. Also, Dems only won five out of thirteen gubernatorial races. (That includes Puerto Rico and American Samoa, which both went to Dems, so three out of eleven if you’re looking at states.) Also, they made no gains in state legislatures, which are mostly dominated by Republicans, while losing control of both chambers in New Hampshire. And beyond that, I’m just not so sure about broader trends with other state/local offices or referenda, but I bet there’s plenty of room for improvement with those too.
consciousness razor, According to fivethirtyeight all presidential elections in the foreseeable future are likely to be close due to the polarization -- there are very few voters who are likely to consider changing sides -- the 2 main parties are supporting 2 opposing ideologies and voters know their own views on those. Very few people are willing to vote for a party whose ideology they abhor just because the party they agree with is bad at running government.
Another issue: The non-2-party-vote -- that is one factor that changed a lot between 2016 and 2020. I’m curious to know what happened to people who voted ‘3rd party’ or didn’t vote in 2016 but did vote for one of the 2 big parties in 2020.
hether he won because of that message or because Hillary Clinton ran a poor campaign we may never know.
Sure, we know. It was both.
It will most likely be a bit of both. With an added dash of Hillary being the wrong candidate at all, and no I do not know who they should have nominated (for the people suggesting Sanders, yes that would have been nice but do you really thing the DNC would have ever accepted an independent as the Democrat candidate?).
What irks me more is that the Republicans are at least doing a post mortem on the elections. All I remember the Democrats doing after Trump beat Hillary was the Democrats running around screaming “The Russians did it” as a justification of why they did not need to do a post mortem.
“To be clear, our principles our sound, our principles are not old rusty thoughts in some book,”
Hahaha. That’s cute, “principles.” Tell us another joke, please.
The autopsy was completed on December 20th and given to Trump’s top advisors just before Joe Biden’s inauguration.
A full month of dust-collecting? The sheer fact of internal Republican chaos and denial producing such a delay in itself tells the story.
The usual republican solution: voter suppression. They tried hard this year but the pandemic confused them. But they’re already planning on ‘correcting’ their mistakes in the losing states.
It’s been said but bears repeating: it was both. Plus Clinton was a bad choice for candidate, representing all that was wrong about business-as-usual, we’re-not-listening politics, much like Gordon Brown did in the UK in 2010.
But scoot back just a bit:
That was rather skated over, wasn’t it? Memories are so short (and not just Trump’s). Trump didn’t just “become” the nominee, just like that. He took on a field of established Republican candidates, including but not limited to Jeb Bush, who had all the name recognition, experience and money it should have taken to see him comfortably into the White House. Instead, this joke candidate swept in and fucking humiliated him. I felt sorry for an entitled millionaire. Trump DISMANTLED the Republican nomination machine, despite them throwing everything they had at him.
If the Republicans had any sense at all, they’d have ordered a post-mortem about why they WON in 2016, with a person every single other candidate absolutely HATED, loudly, right up to the point where it became obvious that they were going to have to suck up to him instead.
Well, that rather proves that the document isn’t worth wiping shit off your shoe with. For starters, it’s trying explain why Trump, who got a shade under 63 million votes in 2016, only managed to scrape together, er… (checks notes) SEVENTY FOUR million in 2020. Only nine million more people voted for him after the first term. Yeah, he suffered. He was crushed.
So… the extra nine million were all black folks? No, hang on, he LOST support among white voters, they say -- so the extra what? Ten? Twenty? Twenty five million voters, they were all Black, Latino, Asian? What? Is this making ANY sense? Are they even talking about the same election?
Gaining nine million votes is an interesting way of “losing ground”.
Of course it does. It couldn’t possibly be the Republican party’s fault.
Surely it’s not for his benefit, it’s for the Republican party? His opinion at this point is immaterial. Obviously Trump won’t learn anything -- he’s clearly incapable of that. The problem is the Republicans might. What they might learn is that appealing to angry white men WORKS, that all that bullshit about being more inclusive is a waste of their time and betrayal of their real principles, and that what they really needed/need in the future is someone like Trump in the important ways, but who, crucially, isn’t a borderline demented fucking idiot. Oh, and they need to suppress the Dem vote, because Trumps numbers in 2020 would have won EVERY OTHER ELECTION IN AMERICAN HISTORY, including the previous highest popular vote, Barack Obama in 2008. Trump 2020 got five million more votes than Obama did in 2008, and nine million more than his own total in 2016. Any so-called post-mortem that doesn’t consider that is pissing into the wind.
borked the closing blockquote tag, sorry.
[I fixed it. -- MS]
sonofrojblake @ # 8 -- Last I heard, 74M -- 63M = 11M.
@8 sonofrojblake
What the party insiders are aware of is that catering to the white conservatives might be a winning strategy right now it’s a long term loser. Whites are going to become a minority and eventually just appealing to the political far right whites won’t work. It’s only matter of time. The country has already passed the point where Republicans can win only by taking advantage of biases in the election system that make some votes more valuable then others and suppressing non-white voting. The more they depend on catering to a smaller and smaller group the worse off they are when it doesn’t work.
As for how Trump got the nomination entire books will tackle that eventually. A bunch of things lined up to make it possible. One of the key ones was that the Republicans had no popular candidate. Jeb Bush had the major problems of having Bush as a last name and having a charisma score of 3. This is why people were lining up to jump into the campaign in 2016.
(1) Presidential elections aren’t determined by the national popular vote, even if we all pretended very hard that they are.
(2) The US population increased over the same time period (about 8 million more people or +2.5%), so your figures which don’t even bother to take that into account are invalid.
(3) Then you got the wrong answer for that subtraction problem. But you picked the wrong problem to try to solve anyway.
Roughly,
— Trump got 63 million in 2016 and 74 million in 2020, a 17.5% increase.
— Clinton got 66 million in 2016 and Biden got 81 million in 2020, a 22.7% increase.
— Turnout increased from 60.2% to 66.7%.
But leaving all of that aside, Trump got 304 electoral college votes in 2016 and 232 votes in 2020. That’s what happened, and 232 is less than 304.
Obviously I feel pretty bloody moronic for not being able to subtract 63 from 74 at the first attempt.
Absolutely fair point and one I make to the “but Hillary got more VOOOOOOOOTES!” crowd all the time. Nevertheless, putting on 11 million to your previous winning score is not what I would call getting “crushed”, even if you didn’t actually win.
Excellent point which I didn’t take into account, but then neither, it seems, did the Rep’s survey (unless I missed that bit).
It’s also a really excellent point that Trump might (fingers crossed) have been absolutely the last guy who will ever be able to surf to power on a white supremacy ticket. On that, however, there’s not really anything you can do about that apart from NOT running on a white supremacy ticket. /shrug/
All I was getting at was that Trump’s victory and subsequent defeat were way more complex in their underpinnings that the simplistic “he was crushed because he was a liar” schtick described.
Contrary to those claiming it was both, it was actually neither; it was the USA’s absurdly undemocratic electoral system. Notice that if less than 44,000 votes in the wrong places had gone to Trump instead of Biden in 2020, Trump would have been re-elected, despite getting over 7 million fewer votes than his opponent. alternatively, if you want a more proximate cause, it was James Comey shooting his mouth off. Changing people’s minds on an issue takes time; changing the salience of issues -- such as Clinton’s untrustworthiness -- can be more-or-less instantaneous. The polls lurched Trumpward in the immediate aftermath of Comey’s announcement that buttery males were being reinvestigated, and his subsequent “Oh, never mind, nothing of significance” made no difference because the lurch was a salience effect.
Why not? Most recent Presidential elections have been. What 2016 and 2020 demonstrate is that the great majority of right-wing voters are fine with overt racism, obvious corruption and blatant lies. I don’t know why this should thought surprising.
Actually, 22,000 votes: the margins in the three closest states sum to just less than 44,000. If Trump had won them, the Electoral College vote would have been 269:269 and the House would have chosen Trump as they vote by state delegation, not individually. in such a case.
KG:
That’s what has been happening (mostly and recently), not what should’ve been happening.
I think Dems should’ve had a relatively easy time beating somebody like Trump, partly because he’s such a terrible candidate. If they really have trouble beating one of the worst candidates in US history, then that seems like a serious problem for them. We should just get some other party which won’t have such trouble. That shouldn’t be terribly hard to do, although in practice our horribly broken system does make that very difficult.
It’s also because they should’ve been promoting a much more leftist/progressive agenda. Along with this, they should’ve done the work for years previously to make the case for it, unapologetically and forcefully, to the population at large and the media that population consumes. That includes making our system more democratic in all sorts of ways, dramatically increasing turnout and reducing voter suppression, which generally helps Dems and is also the right thing to do. There was some progress along those lines, but not much and barely enough to counter the efforts of Republicans. Obviously, Clinton and Biden would also not be the best choices, if this were the plan. Obviously, it was not. I’m talking about things that didn’t happen but could’ve (and should’ve) happened.
Anyway, their strategy didn’t have to be mainly about appealing to some marginal conservatives, by (1) not scaring them with any real definite/substantive plans to actually change things for the better and by (2) partnering with Trump-hating conservatives like Bloomberg, Kasich, the Lincoln Project, and so forth.
It didn’t completely fail, at least if you only look at presidential elections. But as I said in #1, if you consider all of the elections, those didn’t work out so well. It certainly has its weaknesses, like any strategy does. And leaving strategic questions aside, I think it was morally/politically the wrong approach to take, for reasons that I hope are obvious enough to you.
It is of course no surprise that doing more or less the same thing that they’ve been doing for roughly thirty years will give results which are fairly similar to what they got in those same recent elections. The question for me is whether they should try to do any better than that, because as we’ve seen now with both Bush and Trump, it can be a real catastrophe if they don’t happen to win the coin flip.
The feeling is more like disappointment. I’m not surprised when things don’t go the way they should. I bet I know better than you do that it happens a lot in the US.
I’m not sure if this is really the right question, but I’ll ask it: did those elections also demonstrate that the great majority of (nominally) left-wing voters are fine with overt classism, obvious corruption and blatant lies? Because there was an awful lot of that. I’d like to think that some of us just didn’t have much choice in the matter.