Echoing calls for a thorough examination of what went wrong in Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) told an audience on Wednesday that he believes the Republican Party’s “political organizational activity” needs to undergo “a very serious proctology exam.” “The ground game is really important, and we have to be, I mean we’ve got to give our political organizational activity a very serious… [pause] proctology exam,” he said during a Las Vegas conference of the Republican Governor’s Association, according to CNN.
In the days since the election, Republicans in the media have seemed apoplectic, grasping at various reasons for their losses last Tuesday. Officially, the Republican Party says it will conduct a review, just to be sure they know the real reasons for the losses.
Up close, the key players’ explanations have been a bit more frank. On a conference call with donors, failed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said he lost because the president was “generous” with women and minorities, whom he’d given “gifts.” Romney’s former running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), had a similar theory, insisting it was the big “urban” voter turnout that won it for Obama. And Rush Limbaugh blamed himself, although he really meant it as a metaphor blaming Latinos.
The polling firm Gallup, however, noted that the 2012 campaigns resulted in the largest gender gap since Gallup began examining election results in 1952. Obama beat Romney by 12 percent with women, whereas Romney beat Obama by just 8 percent with men. That represents a 20 percent gap between men and women, which Gallup noted is even larger than the previous high water mark in 1984, when Ronald Reagan was overwhelmingly reelected.
