A couple of quick takeaways from the US election

So in the end it wasn’t even close. Barack Obama held onto almost all of the states he won in 2008 and, although Florida is still outstanding, would still have a huge margin in the electoral college even if Mitt Romney won that state.

I ended up staying up until about 7am which was when Barack Obama finally finished his victory speech (just me or was this a very deliberate reprise of his 2004 convention speech that first made him famous?) and, as I recover from the caffeine necessary to stay up that long, that there were a few takeaways that I had while watching:

David Cameron and the Conservatives are going to take one main lesson away from this for 2015

The circumstances are certainly similar: an incumbent of middling popularity in a slow and stalled economic recovery who still gets slightly higher personal ratings than the challenger succeeds by going on offence early in the game and is re-elected. In terms of campaign tactics and strategy this was a brilliantly executed campaign from team Obama, they went after Romney hard and early in the game, carpet bombing the swing states with brutally negative adverts (one effectively accusing Romney’s company of killing a man’s wife!) to disqualify the challenger before he was able to properly define himself. Whatever you think of the fairness or unfairness of this (and Romney's side gave back as good as they got), the electoral map tells you that it got the intended result.

We already know that part of the Conservatives’ strategy for the next general election involve focusing on attacking Ed Miliband personally so expect the 2015 Conservative campaign to take away a very clear lesson from the 2012 Obama campaign. Go negative early and cut your opponent off at the knees before he’s able to properly project a positive image of himself.

Obama’s bailout and restructuring of the US car industry was a huge factor

In 2009 the Obama administration effectively bailed out the American car industry, providing it with a lifeline of cash in return for structural changes to the business. It was politically risky at the time given how the public had reacted to the government bailing out struggling financial institutions but was ultimately a policy success and kept the “Big Three” US car makers (Ford, Chrysler and General Motors) in business and all three recovered strongly in the years since.

However, the political benefits have been even bigger than the actual policy benefits. The Auto-bailout became something of a symbol for how Obama wanted to use the power of government to protect American jobs and had an enormous effect in Ohio, the traditional swing state which ultimately tipped Obama over the top on election night. What was interesting was that a policy decision made in the early months of the president’s term, particularly one that was relatively unpopular at the time, came to be such a huge positive for the president in the campaign.

At the same time, Romney took a huge amount of heat for an editorial he published at the time called “Let Detroit go Bankrupt”. He was pandering to his party at the time to help him secure the nomination and it’s interesting that, like so many other things he did to pander to Republicans, it came back to hurt him in the general election against Obama.

Polling was spookily accurate

The standard mantra when your side is losing an election is “oh the polls are wrong” and there has been plenty of that on the Republican side. 

Particular abuse was been focused on Nate Silver whose FiveThirtyEight blog was the website to go to for election predictions. Silver correctly called 49 out of 50 states in 2008 and, if Obama wins Florida, will have nailed all 50 this time. Silver’s model uses state polls as well as national polls and always had Obama projected to win even after he fell behind in the national polls.

What’s interesting is that at the last minute the national polls ticked up for the president and converged with the state polls and both appear to have hit the final result perfectly.

Mitt Romney has basically wasted 6+ years of his life

Just like with John McCain four years earlier, if the Romney who gave the concession speech had been the candidate then this election might have been closer. Even though he ran the most cynical political campaign I’ve ever seen it’s hard not to feel sorry for Mitt Romney given that he’s wasted 6 years of his life running for a job he’ll never have.

He ran for senate in 1994 and lost, ran for Governor of Massachusetts and won but declined to run for re-election so that he could focus on running for president in 2008. He twisted his views on everything to become more right wing for the Republican primaries in 2008 but was crushed by John McCain despite spending huge amounts of his own money.

He then spend 2009, 2010 and 2011 campaigning against everything Obama did and in 2012 he won the nomination almost by default, again disavowing his previous views (including his single greatest achievement - the Massachusetts healthcare law) and was defeated in the general election.

6 years of running for president all for nothing. His defeat can’t even be said, like Barry Goldwater’s or George McGovern’s, to have left any lasting beneficial effect on his party.

Even though he had the most radically conservative platform in decades, the Republican party still viewed him as a moderate and will inevitably blame his defeat on “not being conservative enough”. Surely it would have been better for both Mitt and his party for them to have run someone like Rick Perry with unimpeachable conservative credentials so that when that candidate got blown out of the water by Obama it would help purge this extremism and cause them to run a more moderate candidate who might actually win next time?

The classic example is Labour in 1983 running an extremely left wing campaign and being utterly blown out, a result that strengthened the hand of the modernisers and centrists who began to move the party away from the fringes and closer to the middle. The Republicans just had two elections where a candidate they viewed as "moderate" lost and their conclusion is unlikely to be that extremism costs you votes.