Conditions were ripe for Republicans to retake
the White House: high unemployment, slow growth, economic insecurity.
Yet Mitt Romney's bid to win the White House fell spectacularly
short of its goal.
One day after President Barack Obama was re-elected, Republicans
were evaluating their failure. Among the most serious challenges are
demographic changes that pose an ever greater challenge.
The Republican could only take back two states that had gone for
Obama in 2008 and failed to win any of the most widely contested
swing states.
On the morning after election day, the Republican Party was under
"a cloud of gloom," The Wall Street Journal noted Wednesday.
The party's base may blame Romney for not being conservative
enough, while moderates say he tacked too far to the right during the
party primaries.
Romney was not an ideal candidate, and his campaign was even more
flawed, but the deeper problem was profound change among the
electorate, amid the country's inexorably shifting demographics.
Washington inside website Politico asked: Is the Republican Party
"too old, too white, too male"?
In 1992, US voters were 87 per cent white. Today the majority race
is just 72 per cent - as the country's Latinos and Asians become a
larger share of the electorate, alongside the established
African-American minority, which has turned out in larger numbers
since the 2008 campaign that made Obama the first black president.
Romney was able to win 52 per cent of white voters, but it was not
enough as Obama racked up huge margins among minorities. He won 69
per cent of the Latino vote, 74 per cent of Asians and 93 per cent of
African-Americans.
"It's a group of people that frankly should be with us based on
the real policy of conservatism," commentator Mike Huckabee, a former
Arkansas governor and one-time Republican presidential hopeful, told
Fox News. "But Republicans have acted as if they can't get the vote,
so they don't try. And the result is they don't get the vote."
The Republicans suffered weakness among women, even as they did
especially well among white men and older voters. Some 55 per cent of
women supported Obama to 43 per cent for Romney.
All was not lost for the party, which held onto a majority in the
lower House of Representatives and retains the potential to block
Obama's initiatives.
Speaker of the House John Boehner said Wednesday that his party
was ready to work with Obama to solve the country's fiscal woes, but
emphasized that president must take serious steps to cut spending and
address expensive social entitlements for the Republicans to consider
expanding revenue streams through tax code reforms.
