Why Mitt Romney Lost
-by David Klein

“There are two Americas.”
-John Edwards
The presidential race of 2012 was too close to call for months before election day.
Was it “race,race,race” or “class, class, class?”
Though not entirely without merit , either/both of these explanations is/are too simple. Neither one nor the other can be pointed to as a deciding factor.
Democrats – and especially Liberals – are convinced that the average Republican voter – who earns about $30,000 per year – goes against his/her own economic self-interest by supporting the party that is perceived to be the “bagman” of the rich and super-rich.
And many Republicans are surprised to see , in the Liberal camp, luxury-car-owning white collar types who earn $150,000 a year or more voting to raise taxes on themselves.
Two questions come to mind here:
Why – after he came so close to winning – did Romney lose?
The Wall Street Journal, an icon of Conservative respectability, was – understandably -none too happy about the president’s re-election. They wrote off Obama’s victory as “the definition of winning ugly” and accused the President of painting the challenger “as a plutocrat and intolerant threat”
Who votes for whom, on an average day?
There was a heavy turnout for Obama among the young, African Americans, Latinos, single Moms, and union members – all dependable Democratic voting blocs.
Among the voting blocs that Republicans have counted on for quite some time now.
Rural White Americans.
Richard Nixon went South – in a manner of speaking – in 1968 and it won him the American presidency. Playing on the fear of steadily worsening racial animosity in the mid nineteen sixties – a fear that was exacerbated by footage of mass looting and entire city blocks engulfed in flame – Nixon employed what many deemed a divide-and-conquer strategy. It is a fact that he did change American electorl history by carrying both the (hitherto) Democratic South while winning many votes among another long standing Democrat bloc –White blue collar workers
Middle/Upper-Middle Class College-Educated White Males in Red States
Very much a question of which suburb or exurb you’re talking about; and in a college town you may even find significant pockets of Democrats
The toney environs of the nation’s capital helped to put President Obama over the top in hotly contested and often Conservative Virginia in both 2008 and 2012.
Similar zip codes went for McCain and Romney in those two elections; particularly if they were in such solidly Red States as South Carolina and Kansas.
A number of Republicans in these areas went for Obama in his first run for president but not in the second.
. In 2008, they believed Barack Obama to be much more favorable to their Recession-crippled portfolios and to/for their need for healthcare. Once the economy started to turn around and their home values , salary caps and net worth all started to recover from the Great Recession, they returned to the Republican fold and rallied around a can-do CEO who would keep their taxes down and stock evaluations on an upward tick.
Forbes opinion editor John Tamny writes that it was Romney’s economic advisers who cost him the election. Some say it was the bad advice of Romney’s economic advisors that cost hium the election. Romney’s failure to convince a larger electorate that the now-fabled “1%” could be counted on to bring the economy back up rather than drag it down; his call for support of the barely post- crash housing market at a time when it probably is not prudent to try to rekindle that market; his ignoring the need to convince the little guy that as a tried and true money maker/ CEO he could be trusted to use his professional skill and experience to help him get back up on his feet rather than face a lifetime of vassalage to big money and the socially conscienceless new American rich.
All these factors helped to keep him out of the White House.
Because, after all was said and done, the not-so-rich outnumber the rich; and the former group simply did not trust this guy.
Is there a “takeaway” in all this?
Perhaps it is this:
The America that Mitt Romney and many of his Republican followers seem to inhabit is an America that is quite real to them. Whether they live in the piney woods of the Deep South, on the wind-scorched prairies of the Dakotas, or in one of those gated fortress towns favored by your average Texan oil industry executive, they seem to have one thing in common: the world they are living in IS America…and there is no other that is worthy of the name.
Hopefully, there are a few of this group who are open to including the rest of us in their world view and definition of America.