Republicans really thought they’d win the election with Mitt Romney. Former House Speaker and Republican candidate New Gingrich said Obama’s win of the re-election has “dumfounded” him.
The Mitt Romney campaign ruined its chances to win the presidential election so many times in only a few months that it was logically impossible to actually win against Obama. The 47 percent video of Mitt Romney was enough to begin with, not to mention all the rape comments. But losing now has Republicans shaken to a new reality: Obama’s win has “dumfounded” them.
For the past few months, Republicans have done their best to putt Obama under scrutiny. It didn’t work as they imagined, since it had backfired on several occasions. As they put their resources into controversial claims, they didn’t take the time to actually explain the math of their platform. Losing was a wakeup call that had Newt Gingrich find respect for the Obama campaign.
“The president won an extraordinary victory, and the fact is we owe him the respect of trying to understand what they did and how they did it” Newt Gingrich said this Monday on “Today”. “But if you said to me three weeks ago that Mitt Romney would get fewer votes than John McCain – and it looks like he will be 2 million fewer – I would have been dumfounded”.
Newt Gingrich confessed he “was wrong last week, as was virtually every major Republican analyst”. The aim is to stop and find out why Republicans lost the election “that far off”. And it wasn’t just the presidential bid, but also Senate seats in North Dakota, Montana, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Virginia, New Mexico and Massachusetts.
The former candidate in the GOP presidential nomination talked about Obama’s re-election in an article published Monday on the Politico website. “An intellectually honest and courageous Republican Party has nothing to fear from the current situation” Newt Gingrich added about the party and conservative movement’s need “to learn the lessons of 2012”.
“This was a party-wide defeat and should be thought of as a profound wake up call” Newt Gingrich writes and notes that the voting population, the turnout mechanism and the communications systems “are different that Republican models”.