RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, in an interview with National Review, gives his bluntest assessment so far of the blame Republicans shoulder for the 2012 election:
"This is what I generally think about not just the RNC but also the campaign in general, the Romney campaign: I think in the year and a half that we had, I think we did a great job. Unfortunately, I think the other side did a great job for four years. I think that’s really what we’re coming down to.
Ultimately where this is going to lead is that we have to have a massive operation that is very granular, that is in communities across America for a very long time — three years, three and a half years, four years. It has to be around the clock. That’s the ultimate conclusion.
As far as what went wrong, my general answer is “all of the above.” ...
...All of those things need to be looked at, all of that can be improved. But what we’re going to see is that they have to be improved over a long period of time. This idea that we tear down every three years and build up for a one-year monster campaign — I just don’t see that being the future. I think the future is a much broader operation for a long period of time."
This suggests a level of continuity that has not existed in RNC or the DNC, broadly speaking, for many cycles now, which has been part of why outside groups have flourished. Whether this is the dawn of a new era remains very much an open question.
We've written on this space before about how Election Day was strong for a number of women candidates, a number of whom had support from EMILY's List, which backs Democratic women and was heavily involved in key races in 2012.
Officials with the group said they are training women candidates in places like New York, Virginia and Florida now and after the holidays as they look ahead to the next cycle.
The group raised $51.2 million, and grew its membership to 2 million, in its biggest independent expenditure effort, officials said, and claims credit for, among other things, the first all-female congressional delegation and a female governor in New Hampshire. It was the single biggest donor to Sen. Claire McCaskill's reelection, and to the three newly elected Democratic women senators, among them Sen. Elizabeth Warren. They had statewide successes and also helped elect 16 new women to the House for what the group says was its record on general election wins.
The figures are of note in that outside groups as a whole had a mixed record of success at best this cycle, and EMILY's List, which backs pro-choice women, emerged as one of the few with a strong "win" column. And women's issues were among the most dominant this cycle on the Democratic side in defining the race, including the Sandra Fluke controversy.
The group says it spoke to independent women voters in key states, some deep blue like Massachusetts but others red like Missouri and battlegrounds like Wisconsin, Iowa and Nevada, and found that persuasion efforts were effective in terms of framing the opposition on policies.
According to EMILY's List officials, they were able to track their efforts by polling how many people they polled were aware of things like the fight to defund Planned Parenthood and other issues that were key for President Obama and Democrats downballot.
The months-long messaging — augmented by Democrats at all levels and by Planned Parenthood, among other groups — was difficult for Republicans to overcome, especially after a string of controversies (comments by Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock among them).
They were by no means alone, and they had help given the self-inflicted wounds by some of their opponents. But as outside groups get a vetting in the coming weeks, they are among the few who will have victories to point to as a road map for the next cycle.
When we launched our blog in June 2011, we had no idea how this enterprise would turn out. The Republican presidential race was still taking shape, public interest in the election was modest and the two of us had barely worked together before.
A year and a half later, we couldn’t be prouder of what this space has become, or more grateful to the community of readers, sources, friends, family members and media colleagues — inside and outside the POLITICO newsroom — who have made that possible.
Now, as we head into the off-season of 2013, both of us will be stepping away from the blogger’s chair at least for a while. With the pace of the campaign world slowing down and Congress coming to the foreground, the hyperactive platform of a blog isn’t necessarily the ideal way to cover politics.
That’s not to say that the campaign news season is over or that either of us will be leaving the beat. We’ll continue to report and write about national politics, but on the POLITICO home page instead of in this specialized, caricature-adorned space.
For better or worse, the 2013 governor’s races, 2014 midterms and 2016 presidential contest are already under way, and we’re looking forward to covering all of them. We hope you’ll keep reading and stay in touch.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie gave some of his strongest pushback yet to Republican gripes about his appearance with President Barack Obama in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which left more than 7 million people in his state without power and destroyed swaths of the shore, in another Barbara Walters interview on ABC News:
"First of all, I didn't help [Obama] win," Christie told Barbara Walters. "I was doing my job."
"The fact of the matter is President Obama won the election pretty comfortably. … I was doing my job as I saw fit to do it. And I told the truth, like I always do. The president did step up and help tremendously in New Jersey."
When the two men flew in the president's helicopter Marine One to survey storm damage ahead of the election, Christie said he made his allegiance clear.
"I said, you know, I'm not voting for you," he told Walters. "And he said, 'I never thought you were.'"
President Barack Obama's pollster, Joel Benenson, didn't mince words describing the problem he sees with the Republican brand going well beyond issues with specific segments of the electorate, via The Hill:
"If Republicans approach this as if they have a Latino problem, I think that they are missing a larger dynamic that's in place right now. I believe that the Republican Party has a tolerance problem," Obama pollster Joel Benenson said at event hosted by the center-left group Third Way Wednesday morning. "When you define people who look differently than you as illegal aliens and use that term over and over again and talk about self-deporting them, that's a tolerance issue."
Benenson said other examples of the GOP's "tolerance problem" included their calling those who believe in global warming "job killers," and its stances on gay marriage, Planned Parenthood and contraception. He said voters who don't agree with the GOP were hearing a "very strident, intolerant point of view on specific issues" and called them a "party of orthodoxy."
ABC News's Barbara Walters lands the Hillary Clinton exit interview from the State Department, in which she says she doesn't intend to campaign in 2016: "I've said I really don't believe that that's something I will do again," she said. "I am so grateful I had the experience of doing it before."
Walters also said on "Good Morning America" that Clinton's husband wants her to run, but that she herself is uncertain. It's unclear if it will be part of her full interview report when it airs — the GMA version was a teaser.
It would not be surprising if Clinton's husband would like to see her run. But Clinton will exit Foggy Bottom — and potentially run for office again — as an independent entity, someone who just ran one of the most important offices in Washington. It's a difference from the campaign she ran four years ago, which was, in many ways, presented as a return to her husband's tenure.
As for whether she ultimately will run, she has moved a bit away from a hard "no," but just a bit.
The Republican polling outfit Resurgent Republic is out this morning with data gauging the party's challenge with Hispanic voters, highlighting two particularly alarming data points:
• Hispanic voters say the Republican party does not respect the values and concerns of the Hispanic community by 51 to 44 percent in Florida, 54 to 40 percent in New Mexico, 59 to 35 percent in Nevada, and 63 to 30 percent in Colorado.
• Majorities of voters in each state say that “is anti-immigrant” better describes the Republican Party, while the Democratic Party has big leads on “understands the needs and concerns of Hispanic voters,” and “makes an effort to win Hispanic voters.”
The full poll, which suggests Republicans have an opening to reconnect with Hispanics through immigration reform and economic issues, is here. At least for the short term, the GOP is facing a deficit with Hispanic voters that goes well beyond the Romney campaign and a mismanaged 2012 message on immigration. Overcoming a charged label like "anti-immigrant" or the perception of a lack of "respect," is a deeper problem than that.
Mitch McConnell is one of the DSCC’s few offensive targets for the 2014 cycle and today PPP served up data to put smiles on Democratic faces: the Republican’s approval rating was 18 points underwater in the poll and he led a list of potential opponents by only the mid-single digits.
That approval number is a bit eyebrow-raising, since it’s sharply at odds with other Kentucky polling conducted at the tail end of the 2012 campaign. The Courier-Journal’s Bluegrass Poll — conducted by robo-pollster SurveyUSA — found McConnell’s approval at 51 percent in September. A more recent SurveyUSA poll, taken at the end of October, found that figure nearly stable at 50 percent.
Now, McConnell’s approval may have slipped in the past month and a half, but this would be a dramatic tumble. The difference here may just be methodological: the SurveyUSA poll tested likely voters, while PPP tested Kentucky voters more generally since it’s so early in the 2014 cycle.
Still, the gap underscores the difficulty of gauging how vulnerable McConnell really is. Neither poll suggests the Senate minority leader is an easy mark — PPP, in its more pessimistic (for McConnell) assessment, writes that “even though a lot of Republicans dislike him, most of them would still vote for him in a general election before they would support a Democrat.”
On the other hand, a 50-percent approval rating — SurveyUSA’s friendlier number — is also not a sign of overwhelming strength. It’s on the line, and it’ll be a while before we know which side this race will trend toward. The outcome of the current fiscal cliff stand off could make a difference.
Via National Review, the Koch brothers' twice-a-year conference that was set to be held next month is being delayed. From the email Charles Koch sent to associates:
We are working hard to understand the election results, and based on that analysis, to re-examine our vision and the strategies and capabilities required for success. Although some of the needed changes are already evident, it will be several months before the state data necessary to complete this analysis is available.
The event is now being held in April. The delay comes on the heels of the RNC announcing a review of what happened in 2012, and the Crossroads groups are doing something similar.
The Republican National Committee is rolling out a plan to review what worked and what didn't for the party in the 2012 cycle, appointing five people at the top of a committee that will make recommendations on things like demographics, messaging and fundraising.
The Growth and Opportunity Project is going to be chaired by RNC committee member Henry Barbour, longtime Jeb Bush adviser and political operative Sally Bradshaw, former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, Puerto Rico RNC committee member Zori Fonalledas, and South Carolina RNC member Glenn McCall. Priebus, who is running for a second term, is holding a call with committee members to roll out the plan this afternoon.
The plan is to focus on: campaign mechanics, fundraising, demographics, messaging, outside groups, campaign finance, the national primary process and, last but not least, what the successful Democratic efforts revealed about the way forward, and recommend plans for the way forward, sources familiar with the plan said.
Priebus had told a large group of donors in New York last week that the review would be conducted outside the building and would not be led by RNC staff. But sources familiar with the project said that there are 2 RNC senior staffers, Ben Kay and Sara Armstrong, assigned to the project as support staff, saying the goal between them and the RNC members involved was to have, as one source said, "both inside and outside influence" to bring in a several different points of view.
Still, the source insisted that "the GOP has problems but they are solvable. We have to look at what we are doing right and what we’re doing wrong and lay out our vision and plans for Americans so everyone knows what we stand for. 2010 was the biggest mid-term win for one party since the 1938 election. Our ideas still resonate, but we need to examine what’s working and what isn’t. We have 30 Governors right now, but we want to listen and learn so we do better in presidential years as well."
Still, given the complaints about the party, the composition of the committee includes at least one Priebus ally - Barbour - and others with ties to Bush-world. It includes demographic diversity, but less so ideologically. Officials said the review will include a broad swath of people within the party, including donors and grassroots members, but it remains to be seen how conservative activists react.
The main focus of the review is inclusion of new voters for future victories, the sources said, calling the eight areas of review an initial start, with other areas getting talked about as time goes on. There will be "informal discussions with small and large groups," and formal sit-downs and conference calls. They will look to give Priebus a review in the coming months, the source said.
The RNC isn’t the only group assessing how 2012 went so terribly wrong. The high command of American Crossroads, the most powerful of the GOP SuperPACs, met last week in Washington, Republican sources tell POLITICO. Heavyweight advisers Haley Barbour, Ed Gillespie and Karl Rove were all in town for the meeting, which featured a discussion of the campaign and the first extensive conversation about how the group should approach the 2014 mid-terms. The group is not expected to play a role in the two 2013 gubernatorial races, deferring to the RGA, but is considering how to shape the next round of congressional elections. At the top of the agenda: influencing candidate selection in GOP primaries.
But before they turn completely to 2014, Crossroads is still diagnosing last month’s results. The group digested a series of 2012 memos mixed brutal analysis with some self-reassurance. In the first category, pollster Glen Bolger bluntly warned in top paragraph of his memo that the GOP is in danger of becoming a party that can only win in non-presidential years when the composition of the electorate doesn’t reflect the country. Pointing to Republican’s difficulties with Hispanics, Bolger, who is partners with Mitt Romney’s 2012 pollster, wrote: "the Republican Party is in danger of becoming the 'Win In Off Years Only Party' unless we make a full-throated improvement with Hispanic voters. And, we have to admit it is us, not them."
Yet even as they attempt to learn from what happened, Crossroads also is preparing to make clear to their donors that they weren’t blind to the difficulties of Romney’s winning the presidency. One of the internal memos prepared for the meeting detailed on a state-by-state basis the group’s final polling in each state and the actual results. Their surveys were closer to the outcome than Romney’s internal data.
Last week’s pow-wow was something of a prelude before Crossroads comes up with their final report on 2012, which is expected to take place after the first of the year.
Via the Politicker, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and potential 2016 hopeful Andrew Cuomo didn't leap at the chance to endorse a second Hillary Clinton campaign when asked by Talk 1300 host Fred Dicker:
“There’s a long way away. We just elected a president….There’s no doubt that she’s incredibly popular, she’s got incredible support….She’s going to have to make her decision.”
...“Oh it’s a long way away. Whoever’s running…are you running?” Mr. Cuomo said to the radio host. “Is somebody else running?…We have to assess all the candidates.”
For Cuomo, who has had the full run of New York for years, the return of Hillary Clinton presents something less than an ideal situation.
One of the strangest elements about the Dick Armey retirement from FreedomWorks is the $8 million settlement he struck on the side with a board member, Richard Stephenson, a friend who is paying him in installments.
There has still been no good answer given as to why a board member would make such a generous, out-of-pocket parachute available in a situation that involved Armey departing because of a fight over another official's book deal.
A spokeswoman at Stephenson's company did not respond to a phone message about why he is making this payout.
As POLITICO's Ken Vogel reported, the official, President Matt Kibbe, and Executive Vice President Adam Brandon, were placed on administrative leave ahead of the election.
The group worked hard to keep word of the impending Armey departure quiet ahead of the election. When I asked Brandon about it shortly before Election Day, he dodged the question — and when I asked specifically about a settlement, ignored it.
When Vogel asked him about getting a copy of the settlement, he replied, “Settlement has noting to do with us, I read about it in the [AP].”