Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (50 page)

Obama won Florida by a point, 50 to 49 percent, with a margin of about seventy-four thousand out of a total of 8.4 million votes cast. He captured this biggest of the battleground states by winning the Hispanic vote, including the Cuban American vote, which long had been part of the Republican base in the state but was trending blue. Exit polls showed that the Hispanic share of the vote in Florida jumped from 14 to 17 percent. Obama’s margin among those voters was twenty-one points, compared with just fifteen points four years earlier. Obama lost the white vote in Florida by twenty-four points, compared with fourteen points in 2008. The swelling Hispanic population and Obama’s ability to attract a larger share of it were enough to offset his decline among whites. Virginia was another must-win for Romney, but Obama took it by 51 to 47 percent. Colorado turned out not to be very close at all. The president won it by 52 to 46 percent. The share of the Latino vote rose only a percentage point between 2008 and 2012, but Obama’s margin among those voters leaped from twenty-three to fifty-two points, a reminder of the crippling Republican deficit among the nation’s fastest-growing minority group.

Obama won New Hampshire and Iowa by six points. He carried Wisconsin and Nevada by seven points. Nevada was never likely to go for Romney. By one estimate, the minority share of eligible voters jumped by nine percentage points between 2008 and 2012 and accounted for 40 percent of all eligible voters in the state. Those demographic changes sealed off the state from
Romney’s appeals. Obama’s margins were down everywhere, but that was little consolation to Romney. Beyond the principal battlegrounds, Republican efforts to put Pennsylvania into play came up short. Obama won there by five points, although his margin was just half as large as it had been four years earlier. Michigan turned its back on native son Romney and showed its continuing allegiance to the Democrats. Obama won there by almost ten points. Minnesota, another state where Republicans had run some ads, went for Obama by eight points. Nothing changed the overall pattern of the vote from 2008.

Party loyalty was stronger than in any election since exit polls began, with more than 90 percent of Republicans and Democrats supporting their nominee. More than 90 percent of Obama’s and Romney’s voters also backed the candidate from the same party in Senate elections. The election highlighted the deep geographical divisions as well—the preponderance of deeply red and deeply blue states and counties. Even fewer counties shifted in 2012 than in 2008—a total of 207 compared with 382, according to data compiled by the
Post
’s Ted Mellnik. Of those 207 that changed, 198 moved from Democratic to Republican. That represented about 7 percent of all counties that shifted, the lowest in a hundred years, according to Bill Bishop.
The historical average had been
almost 25 percent of counties switching parties from one election to the next. Despite the relative closeness of the national popular vote, only four states were decided by a margin of less than five points.
Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist
at Emory University, pointed out that close elections of the past had a very different pattern. In 1960, the margin between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon was five points or fewer in twenty states, which included the three most populous: New York, California, and Texas. In 2012, the winner of each of the three states won by a landslide—California and New York to Obama and Texas to Romney.

Obama won reelection despite winning just 39 percent of the white vote and recording the worst margin among whites of any successful Democrat. He offset that by winning 80 percent of the votes of nonwhites. Mitt Romney got almost nine of every ten of his votes from white voters, an untenable position for a party that seeks to lead the nation whose minority population is steadily growing. Among Hispanics, Romney got just 27 percent. That was less than John McCain’s 31 percent in 2008. Even as most demographic groups voted slightly more Republican in 2012, Latinos went the other way. The shift toward a more nonwhite electorate continued, as Obama’s political team had predicted. On election day 2012, whites made up just 72 percent of the electorate, and this evolution will continue into the future.

When Romney and his strategists looked at the exit polls, they found evidence to claim that he had won the economic argument. After all, they said,
he won a majority of those who said the economy was the biggest issue in the election, and that bloc of voters accounted for almost 60 percent of the electorate. And just over half the country said they agreed that government was trying to do too much, as he had preached throughout the campaign. But running counter was other, stronger evidence of why he fell short. A majority of voters still blamed George W. Bush for the economic mess, and only 38 percent blamed Obama. Beyond that, Romney won by just a single percentage point on the question of who would better handle the economy. The challenger needed a much bigger margin on that question to oust an incumbent president, even in difficult economic times. Most telling was the question about which candidate was more in touch with “people like you.” Fifty-three percent cited Obama and only 43 percent Romney. A majority said Romney’s policies would favor the rich. Voters may have seen Romney as a successful businessman, but Obama’s middle-class message had gotten through to people in ways Romney’s had not. As Kevin Madden put it after the campaign, “We were teaching an economics class, they were writing love songs.”

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Mitt Romney spent election night with his family in a suite at the Westin Hotel in Boston. Confidence was so high heading into election day that Romney had not taken the precaution of writing a concession speech in advance. He had made a few stabs at it, but it would not come together. “I can’t write it,” he told someone close to him. “It doesn’t seem right.” Paul Ryan was, if anything, more confident. As he was preparing to fly to Boston in the late afternoon of election day, he was openly talking about resigning his chairmanship of the House Budget Committee immediately after the election and was already thinking of possible replacements to head the committee during the budget fight coming in the lame-duck session. By evening, however, Romney and those around him knew that the odds of winning looked much longer than they had at the start of the day. The early exit polls and the campaign’s soundings from some of the battleground states painted a picture far different from their internal models and polls in the final days.

During election day, a technological breakdown hit the Romney campaign. The technology team had built software that was supposed to provide near-instantaneous reports on who had voted and who hadn’t, invaluable information to assist in getting out every Romney voter possible. But the system, called ORCA, had never been fully tested—“We were building the aircraft as we were taking off from the carrier,” Rich Beeson said later—and when thousands of volunteers began trying to file their reports, the system crashed. Some angry volunteers began tweeting out their dissatisfaction, and for a few days there was a story line developing that it was ORCA’s crash that helped lose the election
for Romney. It may have been one more embarrassment for a campaign that was judged to be leagues behind the Obama campaign in its technological prowess, but it was hardly the catastrophe described. A smoothly running ORCA would not have made Romney president.
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The Romney team monitored the vote count from a boiler room at the TD Garden in Boston, with other senior staffers in a suite at the Westin. Beeson had seen voting patterns during the day that worried him. Turnout in Philadelphia was huge, a sign of enthusiasm in the African American community. In Miami-Dade, an Obama stronghold in Florida, Democratic turnout also looked strong. The campaign had prepared for the possibility of recounts. Staffers had been given assignments and had packed and deposited their luggage, ready to depart in the middle of the night if necessary. As the evening went on, it became clear those contingencies weren’t likely to be activated. Romney began to write his concession.

In Chicago, the Obama team operated from its boiler room in the Prudential Building while Obama was with his family and some close friends at the nearby Fairmont Hotel. In the early evening, Obama talked with Plouffe, who told him things looked good. “Can I talk to the First Lady?” Obama asked. Plouffe said not yet, but soon. He wanted to see more definitive results before telling the president that he could pass the good news along. Shortly thereafter, the president spoke to Messina. “I said, ‘Mr. President, I have bad news for you,’ and he goes, ‘You do?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I think you’re going to have to put up with those assholes in Congress for four more years.’ He laughed and I said, ‘But look, exits are exits, they’ve always been wrong, they told Al Gore he was going to be president.’ I said, ‘The model says our people turned out, and I said that’s all we cared about, and I said to you, if our people turn out you’re going to win, so if I tell you something different now you should think I’m crazy.’”

New Hampshire and Iowa were called for Obama relatively quickly in the evening, but for several hours, the big four—Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Colorado—were all considered too close to call by the networks. Then at 11:12 p.m., NBC called Ohio for Obama and projected him as the winner of the election. Other networks quickly followed, including Fox News. At Romney headquarters and on the Fox News set, there were dissenting voices. Karl Rove, the architect of Bush’s two victories, was working as a Fox News analyst. “I think it’s premature,” he said. His comments prompted Fox anchor Megyn Kelly to double-check with the network’s decision desk, which stood behind its call. Obama was in his hotel suite watching the television screen as the race was being called. He was standing with Valerie Jarrett and her daughter and
son-in-law. Jarrett was gesturing enthusiastically at the screen. “You’ve won!” she exclaimed. Obama stood impassively, arms folded across his chest. Jarrett said, “He said, ‘Let’s wait and see what everybody else says.’ Then when Fox called it he was like, ‘Okay, I guess I probably won.’” Messina, Plouffe, and Axelrod quickly hiked over to the hotel. Plouffe, ever mindful that this was the proudest moment for a campaign manager, signaled that Messina should talk to Obama alone first. Then Axelrod, Plouffe, and Robert Gibbs—the original trio from 2008—joined them for a round of photographs.

And then they waited
—and waited—for the customary call from the loser to the winner. Jarrett was getting impatient, as was Axelrod. In Boston, they were discussing how quickly Romney should concede and appear in public. But they were also deflated. Ryan was distressed at the projections showing Obama as the winner. One person remembers him saying, “This is wrong. This is bad for the country. This is really, really bad.” As the discussions in Boston continued, Messina sent a text message to Matt Rhoades. He tried not to push too hard but reminded Rhoades that both candidates had rallies to address and the hour was late. He asked, “What’s your timeline for making a decision about what you’re going to do?” Rhoades sent a reply a few minutes later. Romney would be calling the president shortly. “Garrett,” Romney said to Garrett Jackson, his body man. “Get me on the phone with the president.” Jackson called Marvin Nicholson, Obama’s trip director. After pleasantries, Jackson said, “Is your boss available?” He came to regret the brusque-sounding words. He said he was not trying to be disrespectful or abrupt. Obama took the call in the bedroom of his suite. Messina snapped a photo showing the president with the phone on his left ear and his hand covering his right as he strained to hear Romney above the din of the adjacent room. Romney offered congratulations, said he knew the president had hard decisions ahead, offered to be helpful in any way he could, and told Obama he and Ann would be praying for him. Later Obama called Bill Clinton to thank him for all he had done. That’s one more chapter for your legacy, he told the former president, according to someone Clinton later told about the call.

Romney delivered a short and gracious concession speech at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. He paid tribute to Obama and his campaign team and thanked his staff and supporters and family. He called for an end to partisan bickering and called on leaders and citizens to work together. “I ran for office because I’m concerned about America,” he said. “This election is over, but our principles endure. I believe that the principles upon which this nation was founded are the only sure guide to a resurgent economy and to renewed greatness. Like so many of you, Paul and I have left everything on the field. We have given our all to this campaign.” The room erupted in applause. He
continued, “I so wish—I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes to lead the country in a different direction, but the nation chose another leader. And so Ann and I join with you to earnestly pray for him and for this great nation.”

After Romney had finished his speech, Ron Kaufman, Bob White, and Kaufman’s daughter Katie went looking for a quiet place to have a drink. They ended up in a staff room on the eleventh floor of the hotel. There were no beers to be had and so they sat and talked. Later, Romney joined them. “Well, now what’s the country going to do?” Kaufman remembered Romney saying. “This is scary. This is a bad thing for the country.” Romney thought the nation’s problems were huge and wasn’t convinced that Obama and the Democrats were going to solve them. Kaufman said, “He was talking in this kind of worried grandfather way about this is really not good and this is a real problem for a lot of folks who don’t realize.” He said the people who would be hurt weren’t like himself or White or Kaufman, all financially comfortable. It was younger people and future generations. They talked for a half hour or so. Ann Romney joined them, and then Beth Myers and Spencer Zwick also came by. “It was a really interesting conversation,” Kaufman said. “Just the opposite of the 47 [percent], if you will. It wasn’t the takers and the givers. The point was no bitter[ness], no anger, disappointment, frustration. His first instinct is, what’s going to happen to our country?”