Thanks to David Petraeus's adultery and the so-called "fiscal cliff," it's almost possible to forget that there was a presidential election just a week ago. (And God knows the Republicans would like to!) But before the campaign disappears into the haze of social life in Tampa and tax reform proposals in Washington, here are four under-the-radar lessons from President Obama's successful re-election bid.
Even in national races, politics is still local.
While Mitt Romney ran a national campaign — emphasizing the economy and the unemployment rate to voters in Reno, Racine and Raleigh alike — the White House ran a much more regionalized effort. If you lived in Northern Virginia, the president's pitch focused on abortion and contraception. If you lived in Ohio, the race was a referendum on outsourcing and the auto bailout. If you watched Spanish-language television in Colorado or Nevada, the campaign was all about the president's backdoor implementation of the DREAM Act.
Some of these regional pitches mostly escaped the national press's notice. In early October, the Atlantic's Molly Ball reported on a Obama ad running quietly in rural Ohio, which attacked Romney from the right on coal, turning his environmentalist record in Massachusetts against him. After the election, Obama's Florida campaign bragged about having used Paul Ryan's past support for lifting the Cuban embargo to get a foot in the door with Florida's reliably Republican Cuban community.
On paper, some of these pitches seemed to conflict with one another. The White House's leftward pivot on abortion risked alienating socially conservative Hispanics. The raw economic nationalism of Obama's Midwest strategy made an uneasy fit with his liberalizing push on immigration. His pro-coal and anti-Cuba pitches could have prompted pushback from liberal activists.
But because the Romney campaign never found a way to exploit these tensions within the Democratic coalition, Obama was able to narrowcast successfully. He won the states he needed, not with a single unifying message, but with a series of appeals carefully calibrated to the realities on the ground.
It's easier to fight public-sector unions than it is to fight Medicare.
The Republican Party's overconfidence throughout the campaign season was partially inspired by the party's recent experience at the state-house level, where Scott Walker and Chris Christie had taken on entrenched liberal interest groups and survived the predictable backlash. The Walker recall election in Wisconsin, in particular, loomed large in Republican hopes for tipping that state into Romney's column: It was a case where the Democratic coalition was out-mobilized in a state that Democrats usually win, and it seemed to many conservatives to be a sign that even voters in blue states understood that what Walter Russell Mead calls the "blue social model" needed reform.
This optimistic theory tended to downplay recent counter-examples, from Ohio to California, where the blue social model proved more popular than the Republican governors attempting to reform it. But what overconfident Republicans really missed was the fact that the blue social model looks different at the state and national levels, and what works in a state-level debate may not resonate as much in a national campaign.
In many blue states, what makes the current fiscal picture unsustainable are mostly the promises that legislators have made to public-sector unions — a powerful and influential constituency, to be sure, but ultimately just one constituency, which can be successfully isolated and cast as an enemy of the common good.
At the national level, by contrast, our fiscal problems are almost all bound up in entitlement spending — and while there are specific interest groups that benefit from that spending, the ultimate beneficiaries are, well, all of us. This makes the conservative pitch on reforming Medicare and Social Security a harder sell to voters than the pitch that Republican governors have been making on union benefits and pensions. And it helps explain why, conservative optimism about the state's tilt notwithstanding, the same Wisconsin electorate that kept Walker in office last year delivered the state to the Democratic ticket pretty easily last week.
The black vote still matters. So does the white vote.
In the days immediately following Mitt Romney's defeat, it seemed like the only demographic issue anyone wanted to talk about was the Republican Party's problem with the Hispanic vote. But, as The New Republic's Nate Cohn has pointed out in two important post-election pieces, Romney's defeat owed as much to how African-Americans and whites voted as it did to his underperformance with Latinos.
Nationally, the black vote held at around its 2008 levels and Romney slightly exceeded John McCain's low, low, low percentages. But in the South and Midwest, black turnout was up from 2008, which helped deliver key states like Virginia and Ohio to the incumbent. For example, Cohn notes that "Obama's margin of victory in Ohio was almost entirely attributable to historic levels of black turnout in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Toledo." Meanwhile, while Romney won a record-high share of the white vote, that share was padded by huge margins across the South. In crucial states like Iowa and New Hampshire, he actually ran behind George W. Bush's 2004 totals with white voters. And there's evidence that in battlegrounds like Ohio, many Republican-leaning white voters just decided to stay home – which was all Obama really needed them to do.
The bad news for Republicans in these numbers is that their party's problems are pan-ethnic, and can't just be solved by pandering on immigration. The good news is that they have multiple places where they could plausibly improve their performance post-Obama. Just winning 12 percent of the black vote instead of Romney's 6 percent, say, or matching or exceeding Bush's performance with Midwestern whites, would go a long way toward rebuilding a Republican majority.
The advantages of incumbency keep going up.
The get-out-the-vote edge has shifted to the Democrats over the last eight years for a variety of reasons, from the tech community's leftward tilt to the particular talents of Obama campaign advisers like Jim Messina. But in part, like Karl Rove and George W. Bush in 2004, team Obama reaped the benefits of incumbency, parlaying their experience running a national campaign once before and the advantage of not having to go through a primary campaign into a financial and organizational edge that any rival would have had difficulty overcoming.
Such advantages have long existed in our politics, which is why so few incumbent presidents taste defeat. But with the pace of digital change so swift, and the get-out-the-vote toolkits so complex and cutting edge, the advantages of incumbency may be steadily increasing. Especially in campaigns that come down to turnout in a few key states, having four full years to hire, recruit, innovate and organize – and, of course, to carpet the swing states with field offices – can make all the difference in world.
There won't be an incumbent on the ballot in 2016. But Obama does have a debt to the Clintons to pay off, and bequeathing Hillary his campaign operation might settle it. That possibility alone should inspire any Republican who hopes to improve on Romney's showing to internalize the lessons of this campaign as early as possible, leaving plenty of time to get ready for whatever surprises await.
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