How and Why Republicans Lose Elections

By Cliff Kincaid

August 23, 2022

Although Republican Mitt Romney lost an easily winnable election in 2012, many conservative commentators and analysts believed that Romney would win no matter what Obama threw at him. These same commentators predicted Donald J. Trump would lose in 2016.

Romney got only 48 percent of the vote, just two points more than Senator John McCain’s (R-AZ) total in 2008.

Bombarded with messages from the Obama campaign and the Soros-funded propaganda machine, including the Super PACs he funded, voters found Romney’s private sector experience on Wall Street and wealth more objectionable than Obama’s record as a Marxist president. Romney, acting on the advice of Karl Rove, never uttered the word “Marxist” or “socialist” when talking about Obama. Romney ran a campaign that was designed in part to win the votes of those who went for Obama in 2008. It was a disaster in the making that many prominent conservatives in the media did not see coming.

Are they repeating these errors as they predict a “Red Wave” this November?

Contrary to what Senator Mitch McConnell says, when he implies Trump-backed candidates lack “quality,” the problem is failing to recognize the nature of the opposition.

Going back in time, to understand Obama’s victory, we need to remember where the Republicans and their main mouthpiece, Fox News, went wrong, and how they could go wrong again. These people are never held accountable for their faulty predictions.

Fox News pundits, led by Karl Rove, underestimated the aggressive nature of the Obama political machine and its ability to exploit economic, class, and cultural divisions in society for political gain. They also demonstrated no real understanding of how the new progressive infrastructure, financed largely by George Soros, had assumed great importance for the Democratic Party. My group, America’s Survival, Inc. (ASI) began exposing this infrastructure when we held our October 27, 2011 National Press Club “Soros Files” conference.

Mitt Romney and other top Republicans, such as Karl Rove, steered away from any involvement in charges that Obama was a Marxist or socialist with a mysterious past that needed to be investigated. Rove, Former Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush, became famous on Fox News programs as “The Architect” and “Bush’s Brain” for George W. Bush’s two electoral victories. But Rove and his investors were the biggest losers on Election Day 2012 and haven’t learned any lessons.

Rove had raised $330 million for anti-Obama advertising through his Super PAC, American Crossroads, but had been advising Republicans NOT to call Obama a socialist or left-winger. Rove believed that undecided, moderate or left-leaning voters would jump to Obama’s side if that charge were leveled against him. “If you say he’s a socialist, they’ll go to defend him,” Rove said. “If you call him a ‘far out left-winger,’ they’ll say, ‘no, no, he’s not.’” Rove said Romney had to remain “focused on the facts and adopt a respectful tone” toward Obama.

That meant:

No talk of Obama’s communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis.
No talk of his backing from the Communist Party USA, Democratic Socialists of America, and other such groups.
No talk of his extremely close personal relations with such figures as Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and the rulers of Russia.
No talk of how Obama couldn’t pass a basic background check in order to get a low-level federal job.

Americans were faced with a Marxist President in the White House and yet the “Party Boss” of the GOP, Karl Rove, wanted to be “respectful” toward Obama and refused to discuss his true nature. It was a recipe for disaster.

Here are the predictions from that time:

Rove had predicted Romney would get 285 electoral votes to Obama’s 253.
Also on Fox, Michael Barone had predicted a Romney victory.
The Weekly Standard had run a story, “Why Romney Would Win.”
The late Charles Krauthammer was on Sean Hannity’s show, saying the race would be close, but Romney would win.
Dick Morris said Romney would win the popular vote by 5 to 10 points.
Glenn Beck said Romney would win the electoral College by 321-217.
Larry Kudlow predicted a Romney landslide.
Ann Coulter said she was “confident” of a Romney victory.
Hugh Hewitt said Romney would win because the economy was tanking.
Matt Vespa at Red State: “My Prediction: Romney Wins Comfortably.”
Edward Morrissey (Hot Air): “Joe Biden Can’t Save Obama.”
James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute said, “…Mitt Romney will be elected the 45th President of the United States, winning the two-party popular vote 51% to 49% and the electoral vote by 301 to 237 for President Obama.”

Republicans and many conservatives still fail to grasp that Marxism is a means of obtaining power and maintaining power over the people, in the name of the people and “the struggle.” The two main aspects of Marxism, mastered by Obama and top Democrats, are:

Exploitation of alleged vulnerable populations and groups – workers, minorities, women, immigrants, homosexuals, animals, the earth, etc.
Abolition of private property, the traditional family, and traditional values and institutions.

The late author, Robert Chandler, described how the “New Marxism” was based on the premise that “the problem with Karl Marx was that he was not Marxist enough.” While

Marx focused on workers, there were many others who also were seen to be exploited by the capitalist system, including women, racial minorities, sexual libertines, and many other social and economic victims of so-called “neoliberalism” or the free market philosophy.

The left called for “Marxist renewal and re-emergence” by constantly expanding the “victims” of capitalism. Hence, homosexuals have now been superseded by transgenders.

In 2016, Republicans and conservatives repeated their mistakes.

“Addressing a luncheon of Republican governors and donors in Washington on Feb. 19,” reported the New York Times, referring to Rove in 2016, “he warned that Donald J. Trump’s increasingly likely nomination would be catastrophic, dooming the party in November.”

Veteran conservative journalist Fred Barnes wrote a Wall Street Journal article about how the campaign of Donald Trump, was supposedly dividing and weakening the Republican Party — thus guaranteeing a Democratic Party win in November. Matt Walsh at Glenn Beck’s The Blaze commented that Hillary Clinton would be elected president “because Republican voters decided to squander the best GOP field in decades by flocking to a cut-rate impostor in an expensive suit…”

Commentators get things wrong, and that doesn’t disqualify them from continuing to hold their jobs and make predictions. But getting elections wrong, without analyzing whether the “progressives” are still outsmarting the Republicans, is a recipe for another disaster.

E-Mail Cliff Kincaid: kincaid@comcast.net