>Here in Brazil, we had the impression that the Republicans "chose" the worst possible candidate, someone they put there to lose. Or maybe the Democrats voted in the Republican primaries to make him win. A big part of Romney's appeal was that as a tremendously successful businessman, he was afforded a large amount of economic credibility. And with almost 4 years now of the Great Recession under Obama's watch, the economy was the number one concern for many people and Obama was vulnerable on this issue. They then doubled-down on this by picking another "economics"-type guy as his running mate. And this was largely successful in that despite them providing very little in the way of hard numbers, they were often the winners of the "who is better for the economy" polls.
Another part of Romney's appeal was that he had some moderate/centrist appeal as a moderate republican, having been elected governor of the largely democrat state of Masschusetts, and having passed the "Romneycare" health plan, which is often called the model for the Obamacare health plan. But those were both huge vulnerabilities for him in the primary process where some felt he wasn't conservative enough and Obamacare is a dirty word. Further, as a Mormon, Romney doesn't quite pass the WASP test so he basically had to tack hard right to build up his conservative cred to get the party nomination. The likely intention was to shift back to the center to hopefully get the moderates back on board once he had the nomination locked, but that never quite worked out. Romney never quite had the right's full trust, which likely wasn't helped when Romney's spokesman was asked back in March if Romney's shift to the far right would hurt him with moderates, and the spokesman replied: “Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.” -- Thus begging the question from both moderates and the far right of what Romney really believes and stands for. Is he a flip-flopper - or worse, is he just always willing to say whatever it takes to get elected? >Did anyone over there ever think that Mitt Romney had _any_ chance? Many of the pundits and talking heads of the right actually seemed to expect a landslide victory for Romney. Quite a few projected electoral college results around the reverse of the actual result: around 300+ for Romney, and around 206 for Obama. Liberals had high levels of schadenfreude watching the distressed Fox News coverage. http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/11/democratic-schadenfreude-gay-rights-allen-west-karl-rove-donald-trump.php And of course, a 2.5% difference in the number of popular votes for each candidate is quite a slim margin, particularly when the electoral college nonsense makes it possible for the loser of the popular vote to get elected.
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