"Did Romney’s Cheapness Doom His Campaign?" [View all]

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Did Romney’s Cheapness Doom His Campaign?

by Alec MacGillis at the New Republic

http://www.tnr.com/blog/109940/should-romney-have-opened-his-wallet

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A few days ago I predicted some of the likely excuses for a Mitt Romney defeat, among them Hurricane Sandy, the Great Benghazi Cover-up, and a wave of nonwhite voters voting for the nonwhite candidate. All of these rationalizations have been getting heavy airing since Tuesday night. But so has another one that I wasn’t expecting: that, for much of the year, the Romney campaign was impaired by a lack of funds.

This seems hard to believe, given Romney’s prowess as a fundraiser and the massive support he got from well-endowed sectors like Wall Street. He did raise a lot of money—more than $800 million, nearly as much as Barack Obama. But the GOP primaries dragged on longer than expected (dispatching heavyweights like Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Herman Cain is no easy matter, you know) and had forced Romney to spend much of what he’d raised. He was not allowed to spend what he’d raised for the general election (donors can give up to $2,500 for the primaries and $2,500 for the general election) until after the nominating convention. This left him at a disadvantage in the May to August period when the Obama campaign shrewdly decided to spend much of its money, pummeling Romney with ads like this one to cast him as an out-of-touch, out-for-himself plutocrat. Romney and the Republicans knew this assault would be coming—Bill Clinton had similarly “defined” Bob Dole in the summer of 1996, as George W. Bush did John Kerry in 2004—and the SuperPACs supporting Romney spent very heavily to counter the Obama assault, nearly $400 million over the year. But their ads were mostly attacks themselves, rather than positive defenses of Romney, and studies have suggested that the conservative groups’ attacks resonated far less than Obama’s against Romney did.

This basic dynamic was plain to see at the time. What is new in this week’s inside accounts, though, is the revelation of just how frantic the Romney campaign was to replenish its coffers, and how much it affected overall strategy. For one thing, it meant spending a lot of time hobnobbing with high rollers when Romney, and later Paul Ryan, should have been out meeting voters. As Bloomberg reports: “With both candidates opting out of public financing, Romney and his aides grumbled about the amount of time they had to spend wooing donors to raise the money to match Obama after the costly primary. Romney spent much of the summer months collecting funds in Aspen and the Hamptons, rather than campaigning in Dayton and Daytona. In the three weeks after his convention, he attended more events for donors than for voters, holding 12 rallies and at least 18 fundraisers.”

But it wasn’t just the lost time. According to the Wall Street Journal, the campaign’s need for cash was a big driver behind one of its most pivotal decisions—to delay Romney’s shift toward a more moderate tone, his Etch-a-Sketch moment, until very late in the campaign, at the first debate. Many have assumed Romney waited so long because he feared losing conservative thought-leaders like the Journal editorial page or the party’s Tea Party base if he pivoted too soon. But this never really made sense -- after all, base voters would come out no matter what to reject Barack Obama, and the Journal editorialists would surely fall in line as well, as it did with comical dispatch the day after the first debate. No, according to the Journal report today, the reason Romney waited so long to soften his tone on issues like taxes and Obamacare was that he did not want to upset ... the millionaires and billionaires he needed to write checks for him, who wanted to hear the usual conservative talking points:

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