One more point about Iowa: Apples, oranges, and Romney's percentages in 2008 and 2012
The liberal journalists who are harping on the point that Mitt Romney didn't improve on his 25% showing in the 2008 caucuses seem to have forgotten that in 2008 Romney had the best ground game of any of the candidates, due in no small measure to committing to a maximum effort in Iowa early and flooding the state with resources for months before the caucuses. Four years ago, he bet the farm on Iowa. He had more than fifty paid staffers in this state. He poured resources into Iowa as if it was the only caucus or primary he had to worry about.
This year, he had five paid staffers here, and waged a campaign so half-hearted until the very end that those very journalists who diss his results kept harping before caucus night on his failure to even visit Iowa very often. In fact, the chattering classes kept remarking up until the last week or so that it was unclear that Romney was actually going to make a major effort here.
While I'm not sure exactly how many elderly Iowa Romney supporters (the elderly were a demographic that Romney carried handily) were prevented from participating in the caucuses precisely by the Romney campaign's failure to provide cars to drive them to the caucus sites, it seems reasonable to conclude that nobody would be talking about the closeness of the Romney victory if he had invested an effort on the scale of 2008. This year, Romney obtained the same statistical result with almost literally no ground game that he obtained four years ago with the most extensive ground game of anybody. And as somebody who worked the phones for Romney in the hours leading up to the caucuses, I know this: the most common response I got from the people I talked to was from old folks who said, "I'm for Romney, but I'm not going to the caucus tonight. I have no way to get there."
Actually, to achieve the same result despite such a disparity of effort and resources expended is a pretty impressive accomplishment, it seems to me- and not a particularly valid test of how big Romney's margin might have been if he'd tried as hard in 2012 as he tried in 2008.
In 2008, Romney got 25% through the strength of his organization; in 2012, he got it through the strength of his candidacy.
Comments