GOP Governors Say Party Lost On Strategy, Not Issues
Republican governors got together in Las Vegas last week, to take stock of the election results as they continue to sink in.
Going in to Election Day, Republican confidence was high that the Grand Old Party would sweep President Obama aside, retake the U.S. Senate and reshape the country in the aftermath.
So on Nov. 6, when the results came in, many if not most Republicans were shocked by the president's victory. Pat McCrory, however, the newly elected governor of North Carolina, saw it coming.
"I knew it would be close. The Obama machine, the ground machine, is absolutely incredible," McCrory says. "I saw it in [2008], when I ran for governor and lost ... I was blindsided by it. This time I wasn't blindsided by it, but I still think they have a much better ground machine than the Republican national party."
McCrory's take on the ground game is both true, and for the Republican Party governors, politically convenient. The consensus in Las Vegas was that President Obama won, not because Americans agreed with his positions on raising taxes on the rich or healthcare, but because Republicans got out organized by the community organizer. Therefore, the president has no election mandate because the reason he won had nothing to do with issues.
The other consensus was that Mitt Romney wasn't a great candidate.
"I really think this is not as much about Republican or Democrat, but about people are looking for leaders and they don't care what party they come from," he says. "I think what happened with Governor Romney is he let himself be defined before he defined himself."
This analysis also lets Republican Party ideology off the hook. It was widely agreed that nothing needed to be changed except perhaps the tone. For example, the idea that more than 70 percent of Hispanics voted for the president because of Republican positions on illegal immigration was rejected by the Republican governors.
The accepted wisdom is that Republican candidates need to campaign harder, and let Hispanics know they really care about their vote and then that vote will start coming the GOP's way.
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