Republicans Getting Nervous About The State Of Romney’s Campaign
Understandably, Republicans are becoming nervous about the way things are going for Team Romney.
Just the other day we were noting signs of tension inside the Romney campaign itself and frustration over the lack of a clear direction during the final seven weeks of the campaign. Today, Politico is out with a report indicating that Republicans as a whole are starting to get nervous over the course of a Presidential campaign that appears rudderless and unlikely to change direction any time time:
If political campaigns have nine lives, nervous Republicans feel Mitt Romney has used up at least eight.
While insisting the party is still short of full-fledged panic, the video of Romney disparaging Americans who don’t pay income taxes and the GOP nominee’s consistently unsteady explanation of what he meant has prompted a chorus of fed-up Republicans to speak out about a campaign they see as badly in need of a jolt.
Elected officials, donors and operatives are irritated about facing yet another distraction, but the surreptitiously recorded clips have triggered a round of broader complaints over Romney’s fundraising-focused schedule, lackluster candidate skills and a seemingly adrift campaign that trails in key battleground states with less than 50 days to go.
Another senior Republican who’s also deeply involved in this cycle’s campaign was more blunt about what many in the party are concluding about their standard-bearer this year.
“As a candidate, he is just not going to improve,” said the source.
This Republican, looking at fresh polling showing President Barack Obama still in the lead in key states such as Ohio and Nevada, described the mood among GOP officials as: “Not panic, but a recognition that the way to get [to 270 electoral votes] is limited.”
And that is what has Republicans more worried than Romney’s latest stubbed toe: They’re looking at grim swing-state numbers with the soundtrack of a ticking clock.
“We’re losing,” said veteran GOP strategist Jim Dyke. “And when that happens — it doesn’t matter if it’s a Republican or Democratic campaign or whether the campaign has been run masterfully or has been total crap — when the election gets closer, people start to get nervous.”
The common refrain among Republican elites is that Romney still has the debates, and particularly the first one on Oct. 3 in Denver, to set his candidacy straight.
But GOP donors, especially, are growing nervous.
Several told POLITICO that concern has been on the rise over the past couple of weeks following the Republican convention, where Clint Eastwood’s surreal performance left many questioning the direction of what had been a tightly controlled campaign narrative. As Romney slipped in the polls last week and continued to take heat from some over his handling of protests at U.S. foreign outposts and the death of a U.S. diplomat in Libya, the disquiet has intensified.
“There seems to be growing frustration,” said one Romney bundler, who’s spoken to other donors in recent days. “He fumbled the ball on the Libya response. … People are a little frustrated and they just feel like we do have an opportunity to win this cycle, and we’re just … imploding.”
As with the report from earlier this week regarding tensions inside the Romney campaign, it’s always worthwhile to keep in mind when reading these reports of intra-party dissension that, quite often, what you’re reading represents people trying to stake out their ground for what will happen after the campaign. Clearly there are a number of senior Republicans and, more significantly, Republican donors who are slowly coming to the conclusion that Romney is not going to be able to turn this campaign around, and many of them are speaking for different reasons. Some are doing so to try to send a message to both their fellow Republicans, and campaign headquarters, in the hope that it will lead to some kind of retooling before its too late. On the other hand, there are also those who are speaking out now in order to position themselves for what they see as the battle inside the GOP if indeed Romney does lose on November 6th. Their motives are pure self-interest, not necessarily what’s best for the Republican Party or the Romney Campaign. Notwithstanding all of that, though, reports like this are important because they provide us with some idea of what Republicans are really thinking right now, as opposed to what they share for public consumption. Based on these reports, it seems pretty clear that there’s a lot of demoralization going on right now.
The New York Times’ Michael Barbaro seems to confirm that morale is fairly low at the moment:
A palpably gloomy and openly frustrated mood has begun to creep into Mr. Romney’s campaign for president. Well practiced in the art of lurching from public relations crisis to public relations crisis, his team seemed to reach its limit as it digested a ubiquitous set of video clips that showed their boss candidly describing nearly half of the country’s population as government-dependent “victims,” and saying that he would “kick the ball down the road” on the biggest foreign policy challenge of the past few decades, thePalestinian-Israeli peace process.
Grim-faced aides acknowledged that it was an unusually dark moment, made worse by the self-inflicted, seemingly avoidable nature of the wound. In low-volume, out-of-the-way conversations, a few of them are now wondering whether victory is still possible and whether they are entering McCain-Palin ticket territory.
It may prove a fleeting anxiety: national polls show the race remains close, even though Mr. Romney trails in some key swing states.
Still, a flustered adviser, describing the mood, said that the campaign was turning into a vulgar, unprintable phrase.
All of this comes on the same day that Peggy Noonan posts a long piece in The Wall Street Journal arguing that it’s time for an intervention over at Romney HQ:
It’s time to admit the Romney campaign is an incompetent one. It’s not big, it’s not brave, it’s not thoughtfully tackling great issues. It’s always been too small for the moment. All the activists, party supporters and big donors should be pushing for change. People want to focus on who at the top is least constructive and most responsible. Fine, but Mitt Romney is no puppet: He chooses who to listen to. An intervention is in order. “Mitt, this isn’t working.”
Romney is known to be loyal. He sticks with you when you’re going through a hard time, he rides it down with you. That’s a real personal quality, a virtue. My old boss Reagan was a little colder. The night before he won the crucial 1980 New Hampshire primary—the night before he wonit—he fired his campaign manager, John Sears. Reagan thought he wasn’t cutting it, so he was gone. The economist Martin Anderson once called Reagan genially ruthless, and he was. But then it wasn’t about John Sears’s feelings or Ronald Reagan’s feelings, it was about America. You can be pretty tough when it’s about America.
Romney doesn’t seem to be out there campaigning enough. He seems—in this he is exactly like the president—to always be disappearing into fund-raisers, and not having enough big public events.
(…)
Time for the party to step up. Romney should go out there every day surrounded with the most persuasive, interesting and articulate members of his party, the old ones, and I say this with pain as they’re my age, like Mitch Daniels and Jeb Bush, and the young ones, like Susana Martinez and Chris Christie and Marco Rubio—and even Paul Ryan. I don’t mean one of them should travel with him next Thursday, I mean he should be surrounded by a posse of them every day. Their presence will say, “This isn’t about one man, this is about a whole world of meaning, this is about a conservative political philosophy that can turn things around and make our country better.”
Some of them won’t want to do it because they’re starting to think Romney’s a loser and they don’t want to get loser on them. Too bad. They should be embarrassed if they don’t go, and try, and work, and show support for the conservative candidate at a crucial moment. Do they stand for something or not? Is it bigger than them or not?
Party elders, to the extent you exist this is why you exist:
Right this ship.
Noonan is largely correct, but as I noted yesterday, I’m not sure if it’s even possible at this point to right the ship that is the Romney for President campaign. Yes, there are still seven weeks left until Election Day but, at the same time, there are only seven weeks left until Election Day. If this rebooting that everyone has been talking about, but not implementing, since Monday had taken place in June or July, or even in August before the conventions then it would be a different story. Now, with 14 days until the first debate and just about the same amount of time left until early voting starts in places like Ohio, it’s a far different task.
Thanks in large part to the fact that the Romney campaign didn’t respond at all to the Obama campaign/SuperPAC ad campaign during the summer that focused on Bain and tried to portray Romney’s business record in a very negative light, there’s a fairly large segment of the population that already has an impression of Mitt Romney that’s going to be hard to change. That’s why, even when Romney was scoring very high marks on the economic issues in polling, he still tended to trail the President in the topline numbers. People were buying his argument that Obama had done a sub-par job on the economy, but there was still something out there preventing them from jumping on board with him, and that was likely due in large party to the negative ads that his campaign, bizarrely, chose not to respond to at all. The convention was supposed to have changed all that, but I think it’s fairly clear that it didn’t do so very effectively. Now, with the “47 percent” comments out there, and a new Gallup poll saying that they make 36% of voters less likely to vote for Romney (43% said no difference, 20% said more likely), the task of remaking Romney may have become even more difficult. Mark McKinnon, who has been on the losing and winning side of Presidential campaigns in his career, notes that time is running out for Romney, and he’s absolutely right.
So, yes, you bet Republicans are nervous about what’s going on with Mitt Romney. They ought to be, and if they’re not they’re either lying to you or themselves.
Investors don’t like to throw good money after bad. The risk is not just that funds will dry up but also that funding may shift to Obama to avoid payback later.
I’m sticking with my conspiracy theory that selecting Ryan as running mate was a signal that Republicans had given up on Romney already and are now priming Ryan for 2016.
@Argon: There’s starting to be evidence of that shift already taking place among the investors on wall street.
Here’s my plan. Mitt Romney withdraws, claiming he wants to spend more time baptizing dead Jews. His ridiculous mini-me Paul Ryan withdraws on grounds that he’s training for the Tour de France.
An emergency convention is called. (This time Clint Eastwood is asked to berate a sideboard.)
The convention nominates Jeb Bush. He chooses George Lopez as his Veep. (He’s not busy and he’s Hispanic.)
They still lose, but it’s less embarrassing.
@michael reynolds:
That was the NR fantasy, right? After first reading it, I wondered if that was the dream Ryan woke up to in the morning. But no, I think Ryan would not want that relay race. The leader is too far forward.
With the national, and even swing state polls, relatively close, it’s still definitely possible for Romney to take the lead.
That said, when one looks at those polls in the macro view, it’s hard to ignore how relatively stable they have been (convention bumps aside). That means that we’re really not talking about much of a margin of error — chances are that the polls, in aggregate, represent a pretty realistic view of where the race is. And that means that Obama remains, without qualifiers, consistently ahead.
First it was the addition of Ryan to the ticket that was supposed to change the race.
Then it was the Republican Convention that was supposed to change the race.
Turmoil in the Near East has yet to change the race.
Granted the debates could still change the race, but given how many times predictions of the “game changing” event have failed*, Team Romney has its work cut out for them.
(* – on the flip side, its also true that, so far, none of the promised Democratic “game changers” have registers a permanent effect. Polling suggests that Obama’s convention bounce has largely gone away. That said, Obama remains in the lead, and given the general “slow and steady wins the race” approach of his campaign, they don’t need a game changer to win, whereas Team Romney cannot not win without one.)
Pew: Obama Leads By 8 Points, DNC Bolsters Dem Enthusiasm
and this: Romney’s missteps could cost party the Senate, strategists say
That’s kinda burying the lede, isn’t it Doug? The real story -behind-the-story is that wealthy Republican donors are gullible idiots. They’re only just now beginning to realize that their party advertised John Galt but delivered Bernie Madoff…
From what I read today in the headlines, FoxNews is trying desperately to get Romney back on track.
How are they doing this?
By bring up comments made by Obama in the past, some as far back as 1998. Comments in which Obama is on the record supporting the idea of wealth redistribution.
It seems to be par for the course as far as FoxNews talking points, most, if not all, of their talking points are just regurgitated ones from their failed 2008 crusade against Obama.
I would also like to add that, yet again, they are beating a dead horse. The last time I checked, a majority of people in the United States favor raising taxes on the rich/wealthy. NOT give them another tax break like Romney proposes.
It’s a losing argument, I think. Even if this plan of attack does some how catch on this election cycle, Romney will most likely not go into any specific details about his proposals, just more platitudes. Which means he is back to the same place he is now.
I happen to think that Romney’s entire theory of the race was wrong: A generic Republican could not win this election.
The economy is not good. The country is not headed in the direction we want, with unemployment too high and wage gains for the middle class too low. Too many college kids are graduating and not getting the jobs they would have a decade ago.
But a whole lot of people remember the situation when Obama became president. Yes, job growth has been too slow, but at least we aren’t losing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs each month like we were in 2008.
So while voters are not happy or satisfied with where we are, we at least understand that where we are is better than where we were.
Mitt Romney has been running for president basically non-stop for six years or more, and I love this stuff, and I cannot tell you a single significant policy difference between him and George W. Bush. The Republican brand was tarnished horribly by the failures of the Bush Administration – that is the main reason for the existence of the Tea Party, I think – and yet Republicans are just astonished that a generic Republican can’t catch fire.
The bottom line for me is that this was not a winnable election for Republicans. Nobody willing to challenge the paradigm could get nominated; nobody within the paradigm could get elected. That will change; it always does. But what is happening right now is more a function of the legacy of Bush and his party than any particular strategic decision that the Romney camp made.
Concern trolls (FOR JOHNSON 2012!!) are concerned.
Shocking video from 1998 confirms Obama is a run of the mill liberal! 😉
Redistribution is a fact and has been for quite some time. Depending on how you define it, you could say that taxing and spending in any fashion results in redistribution (that’s a broad definition, I admit). Certainly a progressive tax code + means-based benefits involves some redistribution… to make sure everyone has a shot, which is what 1998 Obama said.
No redistribtion means a totally flat tax code (while the totality of taxation in the USA is not as progressive as it would seem if you just look at the income tax, it’s not really flat either) and zero transfer payments.
1998 Obama is basically just saying he’s ok with the status quo, and thinks it’s important to make sure that the programs designed to help people actually work. What a commie.
@Mr. Replica: Yup, Fox News dug it up from the graveyard and tried to resuscitate it. Nothing left but the bones, but Fox & Friends was there pumping the chest cavity anyway with the chyron “Back to Bite Him?” Even CNN briefly took it up, but it was pretty clearly dead before they touched it.
The whole wealth redistribution thing always reminds me of the Wurzelbacher affair, where Obama points out that one form of wealth redistribution is levying higher taxes on people making enough money that they can afford it. As Rob in CT points out, that’s the status quo and has been for a long time.
Poll: Obama Surges In Wisconsin, Leads Romney By 14
I guess Ryan has a negative bounce too.
@Mr. Replica:
The weirdest part about the GOP, Fox and the Romney camp going all in on that (uninteresting) drudge clip from the ’90s, is that you’d think they’d be worried that the same standard might be applied to Romney’s much more recent statements. There are a seemingly endless collection of clips of Romney from the past 10 years clearly stating the complete opposite of his current stance on nearly every major issue of the day.
@Curtis:
“The Republican brand was tarnished horribly by the failures of the Bush Administration – that is the main reason for the existence of the Tea Party, I think – and yet Republicans are just astonished that a generic Republican can’t catch fire.”
The British TV show “Yes, Minister” had a remarkably cynical explanation as to why Germany joined the EU, to wash away the stain of genocide and apply for re-admission to the human race.
Republicans haven’t yet digested that they will need to repudiate Bush the Younger in order to apply for re-admission to have their policy prescriptions considered seriously. Otherwise, they may be condemned to the same fate that the Democrats did following the Civil War, when they could not admit their pre-war positions needed to be repudiated, and lost 12 of the 16 Presidential elections following the end of the Civil War.
The Tea Party is doing this in what I think is the wrong way — it lets Republicans claim they had nothing to do with Bush the Younger’s administration, while continuing to follow the same policies.
One indicator is Netanyahu has been quiet for several days realizing he will be dealing with Obama for 4 more years.
@JTM:
Except that being the VP on a losing Presidential ticket is a good way to ensure that you won’t become President.
Romney has until Oct 1 to pull into a tie or the lead. People make up their minds in Sept and Oct is all about if they will show up and actually vote. Romney needs to get this into a statistical tie and then have a good enough Oct that more of his voters show up than Obama’s. If he fails to do either, he loses. Nate Silver has him with about a 25% chance of winning. Sounds about right.
One thing about the stupidity of the 47% speech. Romney has to convince a bunch of people that voted for Obama in 2008 that they made a mistake and that they should vote for Romney in 2012. People dont like to admit mistakes. They want to believe Obama when he says “stick this out, we are almost there”. Romney has to convince them that it is OK, not a failure, hence all the ads he is running with “disappointed former Obama supported”.
However, calling people who voted for Obama deadbeats who think they are victims and require the govt to support them is not a good way to get people to change their votes. I am not sure all the ad buys in the world will make up for that.
@Jeremy R.:
Yup.
I have a post some where on this blog where I pretty much went down the list of topics in this election and showed Romney’s previous stances by posting youtube links. It wasn’t that long ago, maybe a few weeks to a month.
Romney and Ryan will have to put everything on the line at the debates, a massive Hail Mary Pass. The problem is that those rarely find their target, so my guess is that, whatever they try to do at the debates, will backfire big.
There is no discussion about long term tax reform. Go to this link for an informative article with some ideas:http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2012/09/19/the_great_tax_divide
I admit to being a bit baffled by the doom and gloom. Yes, it would be easier to implement Republican policies with a Republican President, but, first, the poll results remain pretty much within the MOE. This isn’t going to be a blowout election. It’s going to be along the lines of 50-49, one way or the other. Second, Republicans have proven during the past two years that they can effectively control the public agenda without control of the White House.
Everybody seems to agree that the House will stay Republican. That means the Party will still control the purse strings and will be able to starve the departments and programs they disapprove of.
Control of the Senate is a bit iffy but, again, because of the filibuster, Republicans effectively control it, too. What’s more, since most voters don’t understand how a minority party can control what happens, Republicans can be as obstructionist as they want to be without paying any kind of political price for it.
On top of that, in spite of all the negative talk about Obama, House and Senate Republicans know they can get him to compromise on just about anythng.
In short, I understand that Republicans, like Democrats, would like to control all three parts of the government, but losing the Presidency to a Democrat will do a whole lot less harm to the Republican agendy than a Republican win would do to the Democratic agenda. As an Obama voter, I see a win for him as pretty much the equivalent of adding sandbags to a levee. Better than nothing, but not a game changer.
OTOH, there is the remote possibility that Republican elites have come to the conclusion that Romney is simply not qualified to be President. Nah, Forget it. Wouldn’t matter anyways. Bush 43 proved that competence doesn’t matter to Republicans.
@Clanton:
Townhall, the site that is touting an online poll at CNBC that shows that 74% agrees with Romney about the 47%?
Seriously?
I mean conservative sites have for a while been dismissing polls showing Obama leading because the pollster is a Democratic firm, the pollster do work for liberal sites, or the party ids of the poll isn’t what they want it to be.
And then they start touting online polls?
Desperation.
I may go across the street to the T-shirt shop and have a T-shirt imprinted with” a vulgar, unprintable phrase”.
I think it is worth remembering that Romney did fairly well in the primary debates, although it was a strange group of people on those stages with him. Republican concern is two-fold, I suspect. First, they are concerned that he says and does stupid things which may prevent him from getting elected, and there is a decent enough portion of the GOP (social conservatives in particular) who will take him, no matter how bad, over President Obama. Second, though, there is this growing unease that Romney is not what they thought he was; not the smooth, generic, poised leader who could bring the business savvy of a private sector star to the White House for the GOP.
In all fairness to him, modern campaigns are a bit like reality television competitions where daily challenges and inadequate sleep and rest periods gradually wear one down, with entertaining, if distressing results. I actually wondered after his last disastrous 3 minute press conference whether a heart attack might occur. Perhaps he isn’t campaigning much on doctor’s orders.
@Curtis:
Understand that this is NOT just Romney’s theory. It was an accepted truth for the entire populist wing of the party. Just look at the comments on threads at OTB starting at least two years ago.
In their mind, there was no way that Obama could win again. The entire country was expected to see him as he really is, as they always knew he was.
Again… its just an issue of vetting and clearly he’s been vetted.
The issue (to some degree paralleling Liberals with Kerry) is that populist conservatives (again like so many of our commenters here) for all of the high premium they put on “open mindedness” have been drinking the Koolaide for so long they’ve turned Red.
And as with Bush Derangement syndrome, we can expect an even higher degree of derangement from them if Obama wins in the fall.
I noticed while channel surfing through the news shows that the Romney campaign had an odd collection of spokespersons dealing with this tape deal.
Bay Buchanon, Don Trump, some gal from the Santorum campaign….
It may be they sent the third string on the field for this one because it really is indefensible, or it could be the first stringers refused to take the field, a serious moral issue.
The establishment types, such as Crystal, et al, and of course the consultants, who figure the ‘center’ actually exists, tend to get nervous every time there’s a real conservative running for office, or one who dares make noises like one.
Sorry… I’m unimpressed by their concern. In fact I’m encouraged by it. Remember, it was these same yahoos who were none too pleased about Reagan. Thought he was to conservative, and he needed 41 to “give the ticket balance” so as to attract the non-existant middle…
@Eric Florack:
So are you saying that signs look good for Romney? I recall how good your 2008 predictions were…
@Eric Florack:
So, you don’t believe there’s any such thing as a political moderate? That everyone who has an opinion is just as extreme and unyielding as you? That rational discussion to try to come to a better understanding of an issue is wasted effort? No wonder extremists like you come across as bed-wettingly frightened all the time…
@Eric Florack:
While I know that your presidential vote doesn’t count — nor does mine for that matter — based on where you live, I’m just curious… Has Mitt become severely conservative enough for you to earn your vote/endorsement?
Or is he still CINO for you?
@Eric Florack:
Data: Mitt Romney ’47 percent’ remarks hurt independent support
New Fox poll has Obama up 7 in Ohio. Damn MSM is in the tank for Obama…
From TPM:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/09/romney-tape-leaves-senate-gop-leaders-speechless.php?ref=fpa
It was only stupid in that it was made public, no? Surely he didn’t expect everyone to know that he said these things…
Really? That must explain how they got him to agree to a deal to balance the budget with spending cuts but no tax increases…oh wait…
You will forgive those who think that the re-election of the President is a little more than just adding sandbags to a levee, as opposed to Romney winning, which would mean that the levee would be disastrously breached, leaving the country completely flooded with Republican pollution…
Based on anecdotal data (my Facebook account) this seems to hurting even worse than I expected. Yesterday alone two of my hardcore conservative friends (one a socially conservative Mormon, one a “I went to work the day they planned to take off my leg, why should they be on the dole” low-wage earner) publicly declared they won’t be voting for Romney because of “he thinks I’m scum because I don’t earn enough to pay income taxes” resentment.
What is interesting is the arc that so many pundits and wonks are taking. When faced with an election that is basically over and decided, they have resorted to miltiple posts about how stupid Romney is. This trend will probably continue until the day of the election. Then the wonks and pundits will spend a month or so writing columns and posts about how the Romney campaign was stupid and incompetent.
The incompetence of Romney and the collapse of the Republican Party have given all of the wonks and pundits a good excuse to avoid writing or even thinking about the Obama Administraiton, actual government policy, or actual governance.
The Democrats have to love the idea that no one will pay attention to anything they are doing until 2013 when there is a good chance that not only will the Democrats retain control of the Senate but could win control of the U.S. House. But instead of thinking about what change of control in the House would mean, it seems that it is more fun to focus on daily polling results and Mitt Romney’s inability to speak in public.
@Rick Almeida: you might wanna look into the parallels between this race and Carter/ Reagan. particularly, as regards to the polling
@Eric Florack:
I have, and I believe Doug showed the other day (link) that the comparison was not apt. In my opinion, 2004 is a much better comparison.
@Eric Florack:
Maybe you need to sketch out that argument, for as we’ve seen your memory of the facts often diverges from the actual facts.
@Eric Florack:
GOOD GOD Eric, you’re on to something there. When you look at the aggregate polling, you find that Obama is performing pretty close to how REAGAN was performing in 1979 at this moment!
Aggregate polling chart with smoothing trend line – http://themonkeycage.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/trialheats1980.png
Explanation of Charts – http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/08/09/what-really-happened-in-the-1980-presidential-campaign/
Like I said Eric, once again history does not seem to match your memory of it.
And you might wanna look into some anti-delusional medications…