What you are really saying is that Romney lost because he refused to pander to the American middle class’s firmly held view that we can continue to keep Medicare and social security funded without raising middle class taxes indefinitely into the future. Trump and Obama were both willing to pander to that position so they won. This may be true but is certainly depressing.
Genuinely surprising to me that people are in the comments whining about how the the media's abhorrent mistreatment of McCain, Romney, and Paul Ryan is what created trump lol truly hilarious too tbh
I think Matt has half the secret sauce that allowed Trump to succeed when Romney couldn't --- moderate on Social Security and Medicare. Those are popular programs, and being against them is politically fraught. The other thing Trump did that was very popular, and somewhat of a shift was be vocally anti-immigration. It was that combo of moderate on SS and Medicare, and go hard on immigration, that won him the crucial swing states in PA and the Midwest.
It's very hard for anyone on the left to admit that many in the country are very uncomfortable with the levels and speed of immigration to this country, and that more importantly most of the country really wants us to control our borders and only allow legal immigration. Much of the left, and I include myself here, is uncomfortable with both those ideas and wants to pretend they're not popular or even morally legitimate positions.
Trump turned down his rhetoric about immigration, and specifically about evil Mexicans, in 2020, and that helped him make inroads in places like South Texas.
Immigration, and the challenge of what to do about our borders are an almost insoluble problem, but the left shifting democratic approach is, similar to privatizing Medicare and Social Security, a politically fraught position.
A wishy-washy Romney wished when he should have washed. He was last seen proposing cuts to SS, Medicare and public education. People need to embrace him and more politicians like him because Trump. Did my summary leave out anything.
It may be true, and I know Yglesias hears this constantly when he touts Trump’s perceived moderation on policy issues, but color me skeptical that social security or any given set of policy leanings was key to Romney losing or Trump winning.
Even if Trump was perceived as moderate on economic policy issues, his whole persona imo reeked of far right life philosophy. But it’s true that may only be from my my perspective as a center-left person. It’s hard to say. It’s a nuanced multi-dimensional question really.
It was interesting on abortion in particular that Trump was so worried he appeared too moderate that he said “there had to be a punishment” for women who had abortions. He did back track yes but if he was viewed as moderate on abortion he was apparently trying to fix that perception. He then got elected and got rid of Roe v Wade. And then on immigration is it any surprise at all from his far right rhetoric during the election that he ended up separating families ? I mean scapegoating immigrants is a far right thing right ?
But sure he didn’t want to cut social security I guess. Great moderate there. I mean I guess?
I'm *not* trying to relitigate 2016, but it seems to be almost a mantra among moderately anti-Trump, conservative identified commenters (for example, the right half of The Dispatch commentariat) to infer from the fact that Trump "won the 2016 presidential primary against a divided field" that his win of the nom was an artifact of the near winner take all aspect of the delegate allocation process. e.g. in some alternate process (never specified - pure proportional like the Ds?) he would not have won the nom.
I find that unlikely, pending the unknowable effects on the pre-primary campaign - the only relevant analysis I know of to estimate the Condorcet winner of among the primary electorate, with candidates still running after Iowa, was Woon eta al*, who concluded that Trump was at least in the Condorcet set.
Although a recent paper https://scholars.duke.edu/display/pub1483117 infers from the ANES that Trump was a general election Condorcet loser to Johnson and Stein as well as Clinton (it claims Johnson might have been the Condorcet winner, which strikes me as plausible given how wide the dislike for Clinton was).
I think it’s worth remembering that Romney also just, you know, won a larger share of the vote than Trump did, even as an incumbent! He was better at winning voters; he just had a very bad coalition for the EC and Trump had a very good one
Slow Boring is a little like Catholic mass. Most of the year there are wide ranging views that sometimes challenge political orthodoxy. As elections near it is time to circle the wagons.
One other interesting element of Romney's run in 2012 is that it was really anti-immigrant in a specific way. Romney went full-in on birtherism and self-deportation. For any immigrant to the US, to be told by a rich, privileged white guy to "self-deport" and that someone isn't a "real American" was deeply offensive to many immigrants, including ones who are now citizens. Every non-white immigrant to the US has been told they are not a "real American" and to "go back where you came from", often by people who look and sound like Romney, and however much they might empathize with Romney on cultural/economic issues, this was damaging to him. There was a big swing in Hispanics and Asians toward Obama, for example.
This is an extremely disingenuous interpretation of what he said. He was referring to those here illegally and, in fact, his plan, which focused on employment verification, was reasonable and fair (whether it would have actually worked I don't know).
It was the combination of long-form birtherism and self-deportation that did him in for certain people. Believe me, non-white immigrants understood that Obama was painted as not a real American because he was non-white and his father was from another country. They understood the subtext, whether Romney intended it or not.
A quick search suggests that the closest Romney came himself to birtherism was a bad joke at a campaign stop. I wouldn't doubt though that he could have done more to contest it, such as not accepting Donald Trump's support.
His poor performance among Asians and Latinos is interesting, and maybe it can be ascribed to the factors you mention, although if so, I still don't think it flowed so directly from Romney's statements as you suggest. But 2012 feels like a lifetime ago in politics.
This is a great post that I mostly agree with. The Romney-Ryan campaign was attacked for wanting to cut social programs because they did, in fact, want to cut social programs, and their hard-right fiscal policy was a major point of emphasis in their campaign.
Trump figured out that campaigning on welfare-state rollbacks was costing the GOP votes, and that to win they should really emphasize culture war instead. But I think it's important to be clear that when he "moved to the center" on welfare-state issues, that moderation was far more rhetorical than substantive. Because when Trump promised to protect everyone's health coverage and not cut Medicaid, it turned out he was lying. This lie helped him win, whereupon HE PURSUED A MAJOR WELFARE-STATE ROLLBACK! It blew up in his face and led to a Democratic House majority. And while Trump showed flexibility in signing the CARES Act, features like Michael Bennet's UI supplement don't make it in there without Democratic control of one veto point.
Welfare-state state issues are pretty important to me - I was hitting the streets to help people enroll in health coverage since 2014. I'm not sure how much of an improvement Trump really represents on these issues, because his campaign-trail promises have very little credibility. To me, genuine GOP moderate on welfare-state issues are figures like Susan Collins or John Kasich, who can credibly claim that they won't enact social program cuts. With Trump, we shouldn't give too much credit to the old GOP trick of "here's some lies and some culture war to distract you from our right-wing fiscal agenda."
> Interestingly, one person who understands this is Mitt Romney,
Doesn't the fact that the entire GOP hates him kind of disprove the thesis? I mean clearly more is going on here than policy differences, and the fact that the piece doesn't grapple with that at all is perplexing
Forgive me, but you’re being silly. There is no “the base” here. He’s just writing an incredible number of posts. Not all of them are going to be equally amazing and thoughtful, and you’re not going to always agree with him. He’s also not likely to be able to always have the best ideas nor to spend the same amount of time and energy on each one. But there is absolutely no reason to attribute bad faith or some nonexistent ulterior motives.
I went back and re-read the article, and I think I partially agree with Matt's take that Trump won more because he moderated somewhat on long-held Republican priorities (attacking/rolling back the welfare state).
But it was still far more than that. His being more willing to and capable of 'hitting back' and playing just as dirty as Democrats really was important, too.
So a plea from a liberal for Republicans to be more like Romney, comes across as a plea for us to politically disarm ourselves. At least partially.
And given that Matt is a political adversaries, we should take that advice with a whole heaping spoonful of salt.
If you mean by that that he is not best positioned to give advice here, then sure. If you mean that he is consciously hiding his honest analysis out of some conspiracy/ploy hoping to thereby convince the Republican to take the wrong course via his Trojan-horse opinion piece (in a substack known for primarily gop elite /base readers ?) I’d suggest that maybe you’re not getting enough sleep ? ;)
I'd be curious if Matt or others think it would have been better if Romney had won in 2012 if we avoid the Trumpification* of the Republican party? (There is a reasonable argument that its Trumpification was unavoidable).
The GOP could've stopped Trump-as-nominee as late as 2016, either by A) uniting behind a single standard-bearer after the NH primary, or B) announcing well in advance that the RNC had established a formal, mandatory vetting/approval process for its presidential nominees. Although the primaries themselves are largely state government operations over which the parties have limited say, AFAIK they possess unfettered authority with respect to the seating of delegates (as long as they do this in advance; a last minute change might invite litigation). This is how Democrats dealt with David Duke's presidential aspirations.
It's curious—and remains a bugaboo of mine—that the country's two dominant parties are so reluctant to robustly involve themselves in the presidential nomination process. They're like rag dolls blowing in the winds of politics. Changing this wouldn't mean abandoning mass voting primaries as the central instrument of the nomination process. It would only require a modicum of vetting beforehand, to screen out obviously impaired candidacies. This should involve such basic things as background checks and the submission of tax records, which alone—in any sane universe—would have denied Donald Trump the GOP's imprimatur.
It's almost as if the two parties are UnParties—they're simply the two political brands between which aspiring American politicians choose.
I think a major issue with the idea that the GOP could have stopped Trump is that suggests the parties are organized institutions with an internal consensus making structure. Indications are strong that there is no such thing for either party. In 2020, Obama held enough legitimacy and sway in the party that he could step in and push other candidates to support Biden over Bernie. In 2016, Bush and most of the previous leaders of the Republican establishment had lost much of their legitimacy in the party and Bush in particular was constrained by the fact that his brother was running.* In general, I think the base of both parties is actually quite suspicious of the party apparatus as a whole and the only real consensus is when a party has a president (though if the President and a sizable part of the base are not aligned even that can be a struggle at times as both Trump and Biden experience).
*I know Jeb really wanted to be president, but anyone with three brain cells should have been able to figure out that was never going to happen. All he did was waste a bunch of money and split votes. Imagine if those voters coalesce behind Kasich or Rubio earlier.
>>that suggests the parties are organized institutions with an internal consensus making structure.<<
I mean, that's my point: there really isn't much of an "organized" institutional structure. It's almost as if they're "political parties" in name only. They're more political "brands" that people voluntarily support—than classic "parties" as such. That's a problem that cries out for repair—especially on the GOP side. Although it could easily happen on the Democratic side, too (and arguably did, to an extent, in 2016: I still don't think Sanders is an actual registered Democrat, and his long dead-ender campaign might well have cost Democrats the White House).
Also, "internal consensus-making structure" need not mean "dictatorial micro-management" (or the modern day equivalent of smoke-filled rooms). I'd just like to see them do a *modicum* of vetting or qualifications-setting to weed out candidacies that are grossly, obviously flawed because of ethical or legal problems, or egregiously sharp departure from a party's ideology or policy goals. Something to that effect. It's the presidency, after all! The winner gets the damned launch codes, and everything.
In the "Party Decides" model—which as far as I know was an accurate depiction of reality up until at least the year 2000 or so—the loosely structured institutional vetting worked just fine. The several thousand most important officials, former officials, organizers, operatives, party bigwigs and donors from each side took on the task of narrowing the field via endorsements and donations. Which directly influenced media coverage. And so by the time Iowa arrived, the universe of plausible future presidents in a given cycle had narrowed to exclude loose cannons and cranks. And then voters got to pick the winner. It was arguably a pretty good system. A fair amount of discipline and vetting was imposed (using an informal and flexible but nonetheless effective process)—while still maintaining a highly democratic, anti-elitist, American-style open process to nominate presidential candidates.
Those days are over. It's entirely plausible to imagine a Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones or Marjorie Taylor Greene occupying the White House.
How long would you say that system existed? About 60 years at the most? And I agree that it worked reasonably well, but primarily because there were still a strong mix of political organizations that existed apart from the national political scene and required a reasonable level of competence at the local level.
Almost all of that has died.
Instead, the grass roots has become much more in control, extreme, and mostly subservient to national politics. Media has also diversified out of journalistic focused newspapers and major tv stations and into a broad mix of mediums heavily competing with activist organizations.
And I think this is true of both parties. Its very plausible to me that had Obama not unified almost the entirely Democrat establishment behind Biden, that the Democratic primary would have been as bad as 2016 - or worse!
Its also very possible that should Biden's popularity continue to be relatively weak, or should his age become a more significant factor, that the 2024/2028 primaries will be horrific.
>>How long would you say that system existed? About 60 years at the most? <<
In that ballpark. The classic model I describe above went from about 1960 through to around 2012. I don't recall how important primaries were prior to the 1960 election (they had clearly become critical by then, though).
I think this is neglecting the role of the Tea Party in a major way. Given the Tea Party movement, it’s hard to fault Republicans too much for thinking that what voters really wanted was to privatize Medicare. At the time it was possible to detect that under the surface it was just resentful conservatives expressing their resentment the only way they knew how - but it was not obvious.
I think the big revelation of Trump was precisely that: that the people saying they want to privatize Medicare don’t actually have strong opinions about how medical services are provided and paid for, and really, in the immortal words of Frank Costanza “[they] have a lot of problems with you people, and now, you’re gonna hear about it]”. But Trump ultimately was capitalizing on a blind spot created by the Tea Party.
And going forward, Republicans are hoping that being really obnoxious will ingratiate themselves to people whose political identity is just an overflowing cesspool of resentment, while allowing them to run the country (in their minds) better.
Matt, your insistence that Trump's moderation won him the 2016 election is far and away your strangest hobbyhorse. I have yet to meet or read about a single Trump voter who cast their vote BECAUSE of this alleged moderation and DESPITE Trump's racism and character flaws. Under your theory, there should be millions of them.
Policy is a second or third order concern in presidential general elections. It is beaten out by personality and tribalism. Trump's personality allowed his supporters to publicly vent their spleen and be rewarded for it. Add a spoonful of dislike of Hilary Clinton, particularly within her own tribe, and he eked out a win.
The point isn't that people were *attracted* to Trump by the moderation on Medicare and Social Security - it's that by not specifically coming out hard on cutting these things, he *allowed* xenophobes and people full of resentment to vote for a Republican.
Yeah, I was just going to say the reason Trump's moderation on entitlements was a big deal is because it defanged a potent attack against Republicans. If he had adopted Romney/Ryan-like positions, the campaign would have been more about issues favorable to Democrats. Instead it was about The Wall and American carnage, about Trump's unfitness and Hillary's email server (speaking or someone treated unfairly by the media). I think Hillary shouldn't have made so much of the campaign about how Trump was a bad person - I specifically remember thinking her "is this the example we want to set for our children?" ads seeming pretty weak - but if she had tried going after him for Republican plans to cut entitlements, he could just say, "you're lying, I won't do that", not have to justify an unpopular position like Romney. Whether it was talked about much by voters or not, it was a really big deal that Trump effectively took that line of attack off the table.
It was Trump's brilliant turn to the center that allowed him to far exceed Romney's 2012 vote total by negative 1.1 percentage points (46.1% versus 47.2%).
Yep. And he "governed" more conservatively than he campaigned (coming within McCain's thumb of repealing Obama care, calling for cuts in Medicaid (as MY points out) and Medicare, attacking SSDI (as MY points out), and reneging on allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices) and improved to 46.9%.
You're referring to the GOP base. They're reliable (incredibly so) supporters of the Republican Party. Just like their counterparts in the Democratic base. The election is decided within the fairly small (certainly less than a fifth of all voters, I think) universe of persuadable voters. They tend to be both older and non-affluent (not poor, as such, but often middle/lower middle class). Such voters, it stands to reason, aren't big fans of cuts to entitlements.
What happened with Romney in the 2012 election made it clear to Republicans that their candidates would always be tagged as racists and sexist dangers to democracy, and would always be targeted as unacceptable to the mainstream. (You can "but that's politics" all you like, but having the sitting Vice President say you're going to put black people back in chains, or having the Senate Majority leader deliberately lie on the Senate floor about you is going to prompt an unusual response) Because of that, Republican voters simply no longer care when Republicans are called names, unless they're actually Nazi's.
This is not the *reason* why Trump was nominated or elected in 2016, but it was a contributing factor. I think it was likely necessary, though certainly not sufficient. Once upon a time the kinds of attacks Trump (justifiably!) faced would have sunk a politician in the primary, more moderate fiscal positions or not. Instead he shrugged them off because everyone knew any Republican would have faced similar attacks. At this point, CNN talking about how some Republican is a racist is background noise: even when it's true, it doesn't stand out from all the false negatives.
The subheading - that Republicans should whine less and actually emulate Romney - is correct. I would much prefer that. Republicans should think seriously about why they haven't and almost certainly won't. Democrats should think about how they've shaped their opponents choices, as all parties do in democratic systems - and whether that's helped or hurt the country in this way.
Do you think Republicans are tagged in worse ways than Democrats? I mean you’re not just bringing up media treatments, but what Democratic politicians are saying...you don’t need me to bring up negative stuff Republican politicians have said, right? Including Romney himself? So if Republicans and Democrats are both sliming each other, how come Democrats aren’t nominating fringey figures? To be sure, there are calls to do that--“they’ll call us socialists no matter what, so we may as well nominate Sanders”--but it hasn’t yet come close to happening.
I think Republicans are definitely treated worse by much of the legacy media, yes.
I don't think I actually disagree with you: each party shapes the environment for the others' decision making. (As do exogenous events, media coverage, and other things, of course.) That includes how they talk and treat their opponents, as well as the results of elections and how they actually govern. None of that is intrinsically bad! It's unavoidable in a democratic system and can certainly be used for good.
My point here is that in this case, it was bad for the country because it helped Trump win the nomination and it helped cement the view of 40% of the country that much of the media is part of the opposition. And that it was especially bad because this occurred in large part over stuff that was fundamentally dumb and incorrect. Romney wasn't just tagged as a big business guy who wanted to cut taxes and spending (largely true!) but as a vile racist and sexist (false!). If they'd stuck to the actual policies at hand they would have impacted the Republican response differently.
I actually think Republicans labeling everything they don't like socialism is a mostly fair parallel. If you're a Democratic voter who hears Republicans go off about how Obama is a socialist, it's not at all unreasonable to think "Republicans are going to call *anyone* on my team a socialist, so I'm just not going to worry about it that much." Which has the effect, on net, of lowering opposition within the Democratic party to both actual socialism and more government spending that falls short of socialism. (Joe Biden in 2022 is not a socialist - but he is lightyears away from Joe Biden in 2008 or even 2012!) It would have been better for the country if Republicans had been able to articulate why they opposed Obamacare, or other policies, without everything becoming creeping Marxism.
Okay, but here's the slippage in this debate that I think is really misleading. In your original comment, the examples you brought up were of the VP and the Senate Majority Leader being unfair to Romney. But in your response to me, you now say it's the "legacy media" (which presumably excludes Fox News) that's harsher to Democrats. So the worst attacks (as we'd expect) came from Romney's opponents, who aren't expected to be neutral…but that gets folded into a complaint about the media, which is. I think excluding Fox News from "the media" has a similar effect—I certainly think Fox can more than match MSNBC in unfair partisan attacks, just like Republican politicians can match Democratic ones.
I'm not saying you or anyone is doing anything dishonest here. I think it's very easy to look back at attacks that struck you as unfair, and construe them in a way that make them look even worse. Also I guess I agree with you on the larger point that unfair attacks do tend to radicalize the other side and should be avoided. I just think there's some real asymmetry on who has been allowed to lead each party.
Sure, I'm not being as precise as I could be, but that's because I think they're entangled. A lot of the unfair attacks (e.g. "back in chains",) or disinformation (tax returns) originated with Democrats - and then were either boosted or not challenged by much of the media in ways that would have been very different if the shoe were on the other foot.
The reason why I would break out something like Fox is because we're talking about the existence and legitimacy of a specific issue *for Republicans* - the loss of trust in the legacy media, increased political cynicism, etc. - for which the existence of Fox is not super relevant except as a place for Republicans to turn to. If we were discussing something broader, like "how biased is broadcast media as a whole?" or "does the media ask Joe Biden enough tough questions?" then it would be unreasonable to exclude Fox from the analysis. But those are different questions.
I agree that there's been real asymmetry between the parties. I don't think you have to accept that Biden is as bad as Trump to accept the argument here, by any means. I'm just making a pretty minimal case that I think Matt is ignoring: that (a) we all have a role to play in shaping the environment for both our allies and opponents political choices; (b) that that role brings with it responsibilities to act in the best interest of the body politic; and (c) that in the case of the 2012 election, in retrospect it's clear that many of the attacks on Romney were unfair and helped poison the political environment, which was bad for the country.
None of that implies that Trump was a good president or that Republicans made a wise choice in nominating him. I maintain that Trump was not and Republicans did not - but that it's important to understand the context, and this is part of it.
By whom? By anyone in the country? By that standard wouldn't we have to go back to, like, the 1960 election to find a candidate from either party who wasn't compared to Hitler?
What you are really saying is that Romney lost because he refused to pander to the American middle class’s firmly held view that we can continue to keep Medicare and social security funded without raising middle class taxes indefinitely into the future. Trump and Obama were both willing to pander to that position so they won. This may be true but is certainly depressing.
Genuinely surprising to me that people are in the comments whining about how the the media's abhorrent mistreatment of McCain, Romney, and Paul Ryan is what created trump lol truly hilarious too tbh
I think Matt has half the secret sauce that allowed Trump to succeed when Romney couldn't --- moderate on Social Security and Medicare. Those are popular programs, and being against them is politically fraught. The other thing Trump did that was very popular, and somewhat of a shift was be vocally anti-immigration. It was that combo of moderate on SS and Medicare, and go hard on immigration, that won him the crucial swing states in PA and the Midwest.
It's very hard for anyone on the left to admit that many in the country are very uncomfortable with the levels and speed of immigration to this country, and that more importantly most of the country really wants us to control our borders and only allow legal immigration. Much of the left, and I include myself here, is uncomfortable with both those ideas and wants to pretend they're not popular or even morally legitimate positions.
Trump turned down his rhetoric about immigration, and specifically about evil Mexicans, in 2020, and that helped him make inroads in places like South Texas.
Immigration, and the challenge of what to do about our borders are an almost insoluble problem, but the left shifting democratic approach is, similar to privatizing Medicare and Social Security, a politically fraught position.
A wishy-washy Romney wished when he should have washed. He was last seen proposing cuts to SS, Medicare and public education. People need to embrace him and more politicians like him because Trump. Did my summary leave out anything.
It may be true, and I know Yglesias hears this constantly when he touts Trump’s perceived moderation on policy issues, but color me skeptical that social security or any given set of policy leanings was key to Romney losing or Trump winning.
Even if Trump was perceived as moderate on economic policy issues, his whole persona imo reeked of far right life philosophy. But it’s true that may only be from my my perspective as a center-left person. It’s hard to say. It’s a nuanced multi-dimensional question really.
It was interesting on abortion in particular that Trump was so worried he appeared too moderate that he said “there had to be a punishment” for women who had abortions. He did back track yes but if he was viewed as moderate on abortion he was apparently trying to fix that perception. He then got elected and got rid of Roe v Wade. And then on immigration is it any surprise at all from his far right rhetoric during the election that he ended up separating families ? I mean scapegoating immigrants is a far right thing right ?
But sure he didn’t want to cut social security I guess. Great moderate there. I mean I guess?
I'm *not* trying to relitigate 2016, but it seems to be almost a mantra among moderately anti-Trump, conservative identified commenters (for example, the right half of The Dispatch commentariat) to infer from the fact that Trump "won the 2016 presidential primary against a divided field" that his win of the nom was an artifact of the near winner take all aspect of the delegate allocation process. e.g. in some alternate process (never specified - pure proportional like the Ds?) he would not have won the nom.
I find that unlikely, pending the unknowable effects on the pre-primary campaign - the only relevant analysis I know of to estimate the Condorcet winner of among the primary electorate, with candidates still running after Iowa, was Woon eta al*, who concluded that Trump was at least in the Condorcet set.
"Trump is not a (Condorcet) loser! " https://sites.pitt.edu/~woon/papers/woonetal-trump-condorcet.pdf
Although a recent paper https://scholars.duke.edu/display/pub1483117 infers from the ANES that Trump was a general election Condorcet loser to Johnson and Stein as well as Clinton (it claims Johnson might have been the Condorcet winner, which strikes me as plausible given how wide the dislike for Clinton was).
I think it’s worth remembering that Romney also just, you know, won a larger share of the vote than Trump did, even as an incumbent! He was better at winning voters; he just had a very bad coalition for the EC and Trump had a very good one
Slow Boring is a little like Catholic mass. Most of the year there are wide ranging views that sometimes challenge political orthodoxy. As elections near it is time to circle the wagons.
One other interesting element of Romney's run in 2012 is that it was really anti-immigrant in a specific way. Romney went full-in on birtherism and self-deportation. For any immigrant to the US, to be told by a rich, privileged white guy to "self-deport" and that someone isn't a "real American" was deeply offensive to many immigrants, including ones who are now citizens. Every non-white immigrant to the US has been told they are not a "real American" and to "go back where you came from", often by people who look and sound like Romney, and however much they might empathize with Romney on cultural/economic issues, this was damaging to him. There was a big swing in Hispanics and Asians toward Obama, for example.
This is an extremely disingenuous interpretation of what he said. He was referring to those here illegally and, in fact, his plan, which focused on employment verification, was reasonable and fair (whether it would have actually worked I don't know).
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/romney-on-immigration-im-for-self-deportation/
It was the combination of long-form birtherism and self-deportation that did him in for certain people. Believe me, non-white immigrants understood that Obama was painted as not a real American because he was non-white and his father was from another country. They understood the subtext, whether Romney intended it or not.
A quick search suggests that the closest Romney came himself to birtherism was a bad joke at a campaign stop. I wouldn't doubt though that he could have done more to contest it, such as not accepting Donald Trump's support.
His poor performance among Asians and Latinos is interesting, and maybe it can be ascribed to the factors you mention, although if so, I still don't think it flowed so directly from Romney's statements as you suggest. But 2012 feels like a lifetime ago in politics.
This is a great post that I mostly agree with. The Romney-Ryan campaign was attacked for wanting to cut social programs because they did, in fact, want to cut social programs, and their hard-right fiscal policy was a major point of emphasis in their campaign.
Trump figured out that campaigning on welfare-state rollbacks was costing the GOP votes, and that to win they should really emphasize culture war instead. But I think it's important to be clear that when he "moved to the center" on welfare-state issues, that moderation was far more rhetorical than substantive. Because when Trump promised to protect everyone's health coverage and not cut Medicaid, it turned out he was lying. This lie helped him win, whereupon HE PURSUED A MAJOR WELFARE-STATE ROLLBACK! It blew up in his face and led to a Democratic House majority. And while Trump showed flexibility in signing the CARES Act, features like Michael Bennet's UI supplement don't make it in there without Democratic control of one veto point.
Welfare-state state issues are pretty important to me - I was hitting the streets to help people enroll in health coverage since 2014. I'm not sure how much of an improvement Trump really represents on these issues, because his campaign-trail promises have very little credibility. To me, genuine GOP moderate on welfare-state issues are figures like Susan Collins or John Kasich, who can credibly claim that they won't enact social program cuts. With Trump, we shouldn't give too much credit to the old GOP trick of "here's some lies and some culture war to distract you from our right-wing fiscal agenda."
> Interestingly, one person who understands this is Mitt Romney,
Doesn't the fact that the entire GOP hates him kind of disprove the thesis? I mean clearly more is going on here than policy differences, and the fact that the piece doesn't grapple with that at all is perplexing
Matt - a guy who wants Republicans to lose - suggests that Republicans should follow the lead of Romney - a Republican who lost.
I mostly like Romney, and I like his more recent populist-ish approach with some of his child credit stuff.
But why would conservatives take advice from someone that wishes them ill (at least in the political sphere)?
Today’s entire essay was weird. As I read it I kept wondering, “Does he really believe this stuff?”
I think it was the equivalent of 'throw some red meat to the base' post.
I am guessing we'll get more of them as midterms approach.
Forgive me, but you’re being silly. There is no “the base” here. He’s just writing an incredible number of posts. Not all of them are going to be equally amazing and thoughtful, and you’re not going to always agree with him. He’s also not likely to be able to always have the best ideas nor to spend the same amount of time and energy on each one. But there is absolutely no reason to attribute bad faith or some nonexistent ulterior motives.
I went back and re-read the article, and I think I partially agree with Matt's take that Trump won more because he moderated somewhat on long-held Republican priorities (attacking/rolling back the welfare state).
But it was still far more than that. His being more willing to and capable of 'hitting back' and playing just as dirty as Democrats really was important, too.
So a plea from a liberal for Republicans to be more like Romney, comes across as a plea for us to politically disarm ourselves. At least partially.
And given that Matt is a political adversaries, we should take that advice with a whole heaping spoonful of salt.
If you mean by that that he is not best positioned to give advice here, then sure. If you mean that he is consciously hiding his honest analysis out of some conspiracy/ploy hoping to thereby convince the Republican to take the wrong course via his Trojan-horse opinion piece (in a substack known for primarily gop elite /base readers ?) I’d suggest that maybe you’re not getting enough sleep ? ;)
I do not think he's being dishonest.
This has been Matt's view consistently, for years.
Again, some of you should go back and listen to what Matt said on The Weeds about Paul Ryan. It's very uncivil!
“…'throw some red meat to the base' post.”
Or, what, he’ll lose a day’s income due to the tiny number who will cancel?
I'd be curious if Matt or others think it would have been better if Romney had won in 2012 if we avoid the Trumpification* of the Republican party? (There is a reasonable argument that its Trumpification was unavoidable).
The GOP could've stopped Trump-as-nominee as late as 2016, either by A) uniting behind a single standard-bearer after the NH primary, or B) announcing well in advance that the RNC had established a formal, mandatory vetting/approval process for its presidential nominees. Although the primaries themselves are largely state government operations over which the parties have limited say, AFAIK they possess unfettered authority with respect to the seating of delegates (as long as they do this in advance; a last minute change might invite litigation). This is how Democrats dealt with David Duke's presidential aspirations.
It's curious—and remains a bugaboo of mine—that the country's two dominant parties are so reluctant to robustly involve themselves in the presidential nomination process. They're like rag dolls blowing in the winds of politics. Changing this wouldn't mean abandoning mass voting primaries as the central instrument of the nomination process. It would only require a modicum of vetting beforehand, to screen out obviously impaired candidacies. This should involve such basic things as background checks and the submission of tax records, which alone—in any sane universe—would have denied Donald Trump the GOP's imprimatur.
It's almost as if the two parties are UnParties—they're simply the two political brands between which aspiring American politicians choose.
I think a major issue with the idea that the GOP could have stopped Trump is that suggests the parties are organized institutions with an internal consensus making structure. Indications are strong that there is no such thing for either party. In 2020, Obama held enough legitimacy and sway in the party that he could step in and push other candidates to support Biden over Bernie. In 2016, Bush and most of the previous leaders of the Republican establishment had lost much of their legitimacy in the party and Bush in particular was constrained by the fact that his brother was running.* In general, I think the base of both parties is actually quite suspicious of the party apparatus as a whole and the only real consensus is when a party has a president (though if the President and a sizable part of the base are not aligned even that can be a struggle at times as both Trump and Biden experience).
*I know Jeb really wanted to be president, but anyone with three brain cells should have been able to figure out that was never going to happen. All he did was waste a bunch of money and split votes. Imagine if those voters coalesce behind Kasich or Rubio earlier.
>>that suggests the parties are organized institutions with an internal consensus making structure.<<
I mean, that's my point: there really isn't much of an "organized" institutional structure. It's almost as if they're "political parties" in name only. They're more political "brands" that people voluntarily support—than classic "parties" as such. That's a problem that cries out for repair—especially on the GOP side. Although it could easily happen on the Democratic side, too (and arguably did, to an extent, in 2016: I still don't think Sanders is an actual registered Democrat, and his long dead-ender campaign might well have cost Democrats the White House).
Also, "internal consensus-making structure" need not mean "dictatorial micro-management" (or the modern day equivalent of smoke-filled rooms). I'd just like to see them do a *modicum* of vetting or qualifications-setting to weed out candidacies that are grossly, obviously flawed because of ethical or legal problems, or egregiously sharp departure from a party's ideology or policy goals. Something to that effect. It's the presidency, after all! The winner gets the damned launch codes, and everything.
In the "Party Decides" model—which as far as I know was an accurate depiction of reality up until at least the year 2000 or so—the loosely structured institutional vetting worked just fine. The several thousand most important officials, former officials, organizers, operatives, party bigwigs and donors from each side took on the task of narrowing the field via endorsements and donations. Which directly influenced media coverage. And so by the time Iowa arrived, the universe of plausible future presidents in a given cycle had narrowed to exclude loose cannons and cranks. And then voters got to pick the winner. It was arguably a pretty good system. A fair amount of discipline and vetting was imposed (using an informal and flexible but nonetheless effective process)—while still maintaining a highly democratic, anti-elitist, American-style open process to nominate presidential candidates.
Those days are over. It's entirely plausible to imagine a Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones or Marjorie Taylor Greene occupying the White House.
How long would you say that system existed? About 60 years at the most? And I agree that it worked reasonably well, but primarily because there were still a strong mix of political organizations that existed apart from the national political scene and required a reasonable level of competence at the local level.
Almost all of that has died.
Instead, the grass roots has become much more in control, extreme, and mostly subservient to national politics. Media has also diversified out of journalistic focused newspapers and major tv stations and into a broad mix of mediums heavily competing with activist organizations.
And I think this is true of both parties. Its very plausible to me that had Obama not unified almost the entirely Democrat establishment behind Biden, that the Democratic primary would have been as bad as 2016 - or worse!
Its also very possible that should Biden's popularity continue to be relatively weak, or should his age become a more significant factor, that the 2024/2028 primaries will be horrific.
>>How long would you say that system existed? About 60 years at the most? <<
In that ballpark. The classic model I describe above went from about 1960 through to around 2012. I don't recall how important primaries were prior to the 1960 election (they had clearly become critical by then, though).
I think this is neglecting the role of the Tea Party in a major way. Given the Tea Party movement, it’s hard to fault Republicans too much for thinking that what voters really wanted was to privatize Medicare. At the time it was possible to detect that under the surface it was just resentful conservatives expressing their resentment the only way they knew how - but it was not obvious.
I think the big revelation of Trump was precisely that: that the people saying they want to privatize Medicare don’t actually have strong opinions about how medical services are provided and paid for, and really, in the immortal words of Frank Costanza “[they] have a lot of problems with you people, and now, you’re gonna hear about it]”. But Trump ultimately was capitalizing on a blind spot created by the Tea Party.
And going forward, Republicans are hoping that being really obnoxious will ingratiate themselves to people whose political identity is just an overflowing cesspool of resentment, while allowing them to run the country (in their minds) better.
Matt, your insistence that Trump's moderation won him the 2016 election is far and away your strangest hobbyhorse. I have yet to meet or read about a single Trump voter who cast their vote BECAUSE of this alleged moderation and DESPITE Trump's racism and character flaws. Under your theory, there should be millions of them.
Policy is a second or third order concern in presidential general elections. It is beaten out by personality and tribalism. Trump's personality allowed his supporters to publicly vent their spleen and be rewarded for it. Add a spoonful of dislike of Hilary Clinton, particularly within her own tribe, and he eked out a win.
The point isn't that people were *attracted* to Trump by the moderation on Medicare and Social Security - it's that by not specifically coming out hard on cutting these things, he *allowed* xenophobes and people full of resentment to vote for a Republican.
Yeah, I was just going to say the reason Trump's moderation on entitlements was a big deal is because it defanged a potent attack against Republicans. If he had adopted Romney/Ryan-like positions, the campaign would have been more about issues favorable to Democrats. Instead it was about The Wall and American carnage, about Trump's unfitness and Hillary's email server (speaking or someone treated unfairly by the media). I think Hillary shouldn't have made so much of the campaign about how Trump was a bad person - I specifically remember thinking her "is this the example we want to set for our children?" ads seeming pretty weak - but if she had tried going after him for Republican plans to cut entitlements, he could just say, "you're lying, I won't do that", not have to justify an unpopular position like Romney. Whether it was talked about much by voters or not, it was a really big deal that Trump effectively took that line of attack off the table.
It was Trump's brilliant turn to the center that allowed him to far exceed Romney's 2012 vote total by negative 1.1 percentage points (46.1% versus 47.2%).
Yep. And he "governed" more conservatively than he campaigned (coming within McCain's thumb of repealing Obama care, calling for cuts in Medicaid (as MY points out) and Medicare, attacking SSDI (as MY points out), and reneging on allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices) and improved to 46.9%.
You're referring to the GOP base. They're reliable (incredibly so) supporters of the Republican Party. Just like their counterparts in the Democratic base. The election is decided within the fairly small (certainly less than a fifth of all voters, I think) universe of persuadable voters. They tend to be both older and non-affluent (not poor, as such, but often middle/lower middle class). Such voters, it stands to reason, aren't big fans of cuts to entitlements.
What happened with Romney in the 2012 election made it clear to Republicans that their candidates would always be tagged as racists and sexist dangers to democracy, and would always be targeted as unacceptable to the mainstream. (You can "but that's politics" all you like, but having the sitting Vice President say you're going to put black people back in chains, or having the Senate Majority leader deliberately lie on the Senate floor about you is going to prompt an unusual response) Because of that, Republican voters simply no longer care when Republicans are called names, unless they're actually Nazi's.
This is not the *reason* why Trump was nominated or elected in 2016, but it was a contributing factor. I think it was likely necessary, though certainly not sufficient. Once upon a time the kinds of attacks Trump (justifiably!) faced would have sunk a politician in the primary, more moderate fiscal positions or not. Instead he shrugged them off because everyone knew any Republican would have faced similar attacks. At this point, CNN talking about how some Republican is a racist is background noise: even when it's true, it doesn't stand out from all the false negatives.
The subheading - that Republicans should whine less and actually emulate Romney - is correct. I would much prefer that. Republicans should think seriously about why they haven't and almost certainly won't. Democrats should think about how they've shaped their opponents choices, as all parties do in democratic systems - and whether that's helped or hurt the country in this way.
Do you think Republicans are tagged in worse ways than Democrats? I mean you’re not just bringing up media treatments, but what Democratic politicians are saying...you don’t need me to bring up negative stuff Republican politicians have said, right? Including Romney himself? So if Republicans and Democrats are both sliming each other, how come Democrats aren’t nominating fringey figures? To be sure, there are calls to do that--“they’ll call us socialists no matter what, so we may as well nominate Sanders”--but it hasn’t yet come close to happening.
I think Republicans are definitely treated worse by much of the legacy media, yes.
I don't think I actually disagree with you: each party shapes the environment for the others' decision making. (As do exogenous events, media coverage, and other things, of course.) That includes how they talk and treat their opponents, as well as the results of elections and how they actually govern. None of that is intrinsically bad! It's unavoidable in a democratic system and can certainly be used for good.
My point here is that in this case, it was bad for the country because it helped Trump win the nomination and it helped cement the view of 40% of the country that much of the media is part of the opposition. And that it was especially bad because this occurred in large part over stuff that was fundamentally dumb and incorrect. Romney wasn't just tagged as a big business guy who wanted to cut taxes and spending (largely true!) but as a vile racist and sexist (false!). If they'd stuck to the actual policies at hand they would have impacted the Republican response differently.
I actually think Republicans labeling everything they don't like socialism is a mostly fair parallel. If you're a Democratic voter who hears Republicans go off about how Obama is a socialist, it's not at all unreasonable to think "Republicans are going to call *anyone* on my team a socialist, so I'm just not going to worry about it that much." Which has the effect, on net, of lowering opposition within the Democratic party to both actual socialism and more government spending that falls short of socialism. (Joe Biden in 2022 is not a socialist - but he is lightyears away from Joe Biden in 2008 or even 2012!) It would have been better for the country if Republicans had been able to articulate why they opposed Obamacare, or other policies, without everything becoming creeping Marxism.
Okay, but here's the slippage in this debate that I think is really misleading. In your original comment, the examples you brought up were of the VP and the Senate Majority Leader being unfair to Romney. But in your response to me, you now say it's the "legacy media" (which presumably excludes Fox News) that's harsher to Democrats. So the worst attacks (as we'd expect) came from Romney's opponents, who aren't expected to be neutral…but that gets folded into a complaint about the media, which is. I think excluding Fox News from "the media" has a similar effect—I certainly think Fox can more than match MSNBC in unfair partisan attacks, just like Republican politicians can match Democratic ones.
I'm not saying you or anyone is doing anything dishonest here. I think it's very easy to look back at attacks that struck you as unfair, and construe them in a way that make them look even worse. Also I guess I agree with you on the larger point that unfair attacks do tend to radicalize the other side and should be avoided. I just think there's some real asymmetry on who has been allowed to lead each party.
Sure, I'm not being as precise as I could be, but that's because I think they're entangled. A lot of the unfair attacks (e.g. "back in chains",) or disinformation (tax returns) originated with Democrats - and then were either boosted or not challenged by much of the media in ways that would have been very different if the shoe were on the other foot.
The reason why I would break out something like Fox is because we're talking about the existence and legitimacy of a specific issue *for Republicans* - the loss of trust in the legacy media, increased political cynicism, etc. - for which the existence of Fox is not super relevant except as a place for Republicans to turn to. If we were discussing something broader, like "how biased is broadcast media as a whole?" or "does the media ask Joe Biden enough tough questions?" then it would be unreasonable to exclude Fox from the analysis. But those are different questions.
I agree that there's been real asymmetry between the parties. I don't think you have to accept that Biden is as bad as Trump to accept the argument here, by any means. I'm just making a pretty minimal case that I think Matt is ignoring: that (a) we all have a role to play in shaping the environment for both our allies and opponents political choices; (b) that that role brings with it responsibilities to act in the best interest of the body politic; and (c) that in the case of the 2012 election, in retrospect it's clear that many of the attacks on Romney were unfair and helped poison the political environment, which was bad for the country.
None of that implies that Trump was a good president or that Republicans made a wise choice in nominating him. I maintain that Trump was not and Republicans did not - but that it's important to understand the context, and this is part of it.
Who was the last Republican presidential nominee that was *not* compared to Hitler?
By whom? By anyone in the country? By that standard wouldn't we have to go back to, like, the 1960 election to find a candidate from either party who wasn't compared to Hitler?
By other politicians and/or the mainstream media.
Then, Romney, to my knowledge.