WEEK 8
Grantham University
BA460
Abstract
Complete a 1 to 2 page paper in APA format (plus cover sheet and reference page) that briefly describes the PR campaign each candidate conducted in the last presidential election. Was the campaign a success or failure? Defend your position.
The United States presidential election of 2012 was the 57th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. The Democratic nominee, incumbent President Barack Obama, and his running mate, Vice President Joe Biden, were elected to a second term, defeating the Republican nominee, former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney, and his running mate, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
Romney’s campaign made a series of costly financial, strategic, and political mistakes that, in retrospect, all but assured the candidate’s defeat, given the revolutionary turnout tactics and tactical smarts of President Obama’s operation. This
Rich Beeson, the Romney political director said that only after the election did he realize what Obama was doing with so much manpower on the ground. Obama had more than 3,000 paid workers nationwide, compared with 500 for Romney, and hundreds of thousands of volunteers. Which gave Obama the advantage of literally creating a one to one contact with voters, which the Romney staff could not compete with.
Romney allowed the other side to define him & his GOP agenda despite a miserable economic record and negative advertising. The effect was shown on Election Day polls showed that the vast majority of voters concluded that Romney did not really care about average people. Millions of women were convinced that Romney and the Republican Party were hostile to them. Single women outnumber married women and they went overwhelmingly for Obama. Here again the President was aided immeasurably by two GOP senatorial candidates making indefensible remarks that allowed the Democrats to hammer home their “Republican war on women” theme.
The Obama campaign spent over $200 million trashing Mitt Romney before the republican convention. Romney never fully recovered from those assaults, because his campaign never responded to them in the spring and summer. While the debates undid much of the damage, they were not enough. The common consensus was that, Romney came across as a credible alternative to Obama but not necessarily the better alternative.
When Obama entered the election year in 2012 job approval ratings that were dangerously low at approximately 40% and an unemployment rate that was dangerously high close to 10%, but even with all this going on, he benefited enormously from not having to fight for his party's nomination.
Obama campaign was all over the social media space because his campaign made good use of this free source that has never been fully tapped before. Because his campaign team realized that the real power of social media is not just in the number of posts or Tweets but in others engaging the posts and republishing by the public. For example, Obama logged twice as many Facebook “Likes” and nearly 20 times as many re-tweets as Romney. With his existing social media base and spreadable content, Obama had far superior reach.
As for this election it basically was like any other one before it, both sides what was available and a lot of money to push their issues ahead of the other guy but Obama had a lot more money to play with than the Romney did. And Obama made use of that new asset to the election race, making use of the digital public media to his fullest advantage.
References
1. http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2012/president/2012/12/23/the-story-behind-mitt-romney loss-the-presidential-campaign-president- bama/2QWkUB9pJgVIi1mAcIhQjL/story.html
2. http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2012/11/08/the-five-reasons-why-romney-lost/
3. http://millercenter.org/president/biography/obama-campaigns-and-elections 