he wasn’t going to win there, he wasn’t going to win anywhere. He wasn’t going to win the presidency.
Dazed and devastated, Republicans tried to make sense of what they were seeing. Fewer votes than McCain? In Ohio? How was it possible? The comprehensive answer provided weeks later by Romney’s pollster, Neil Newhouse, was that two hundred thousand white voters who turned out in 2008 had stayed home in 2012, the result of disillusionment with Obama and distaste for Romney. But even before that analysis, the exit polling of voters who did show up told a simple story:14
22 percent of Ohio voters said the most important quality they looked for in a candidate is that he “cares about people like me”; Obama won 84 percent of them.
56 percent of Ohio voters thought Romney’s policies would favor the rich; Obama won 87 percent of them.
60 percent of Ohio voters supported the bailout of the Detroit automakers; Obama won 74 percent of them.
It was the same story in exit polling all across the country. Voters perceived Romney to be unsympathetic to the working man, an advocate of the super-affluent, someone who couldn’t possibly empathize with the struggles of everyday people. Obama’s team spent much of 2012 framing this picture, and with the “47 percent” commentary, Romney had colored it in himself.
“The reason I got involved in politics was to try and help the average American,” Romney says. Noting his struggle to connect with those average Americans, he adds, without a hint of irony, “The skill in communicating that is a particular capability that I wish I had in more abundance.”
Trump, who attended Romney’s Election Night party and recalls with a certain glee watching the candidate’s staff agonizing over the results in Ohio, says, “Maybe they focused on the wrong things and in the wrong areas, because they lost Ohio by a fairly substantial amount.” When I cite the low turnout of working-class whites, Trump can no longer suppress his grin: “And I brought them out in numbers that they never even knew existed. Because they liked me.”
Romney (and the party at large) also performed dismally with swing voters. Though he won independents by 5 points, that number was misleading; self-described “moderates” were a much larger chunk of the electorate, and Obama carried that group by 15 points. Meanwhile, Obama won women by 12 points, and Romney won men by 8 points; that combined 20-point “gender gap” was the widest margin seen in a presidential election since 1952, according to Gallup. (Some credit was due Akin and Mourdock, both of whom snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in losing their red state Senate races.)
“The dangerous Mitt Romney, to us, would have been the Mitt Romney appealing to moderate voters and suburban woman. And he never really got there,” Axelrod says. “He had to distort himself to win the nomination; he had to present himself as further to the right than he really was. I don’t think closing Planned Parenthood was actually a passion project of his. I don’t think there was anything in his record in Massachusetts that suggested he would be a fervent anti-immigration foe, and as a businessman he probably felt the opposite way. But he had to paint this portrait of himself that would pass muster in the new Republican Party.”
Although Romney failed to turn out white voters in certain states, he did win an impressive majority of those who showed up: 59 percent of whites backed Romney nationwide, compared to just 39 percent for the president. This was 4 points lower than Obama’s 43 percent showing against McCain four years earlier, and the worst performance among whites by a Democratic nominee since Walter Mondale during Ronald Reagan’s forty-nine-state steamrolling in 1984.
It would have once been unthinkable for a presidential candidate to lose 59 percent of whites and still win the White House. But the acceleration of demographic change in the country made it possible—as did Obama’s dominance among minority voters. The president won 93 percent of black voters and 73 percent of Asians. Most alarmingly, he carried 71 percent of Hispanics, the fastest-growing bloc of voters in the country, compared to just 27 percent for Romney, the worst showing for a Republican since Bob Dole in 1996. All told, Romney won just 17 percent of nonwhite voters nationwide.
There were a few bright spots for the Republican Party. Two of its longtime conservative stalwarts in the House, Mike Pence and Jeff Flake, won their statewide races for governor and senator,