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Some Republicans are still struggling to accept the result. The disappointment of defeat has been made greater by the assumption of victory. They believed the pollsters who told them they were going to win. They lapped it up when their candidate said that he had only written one speech. They were certain that everything that needed to break for them would and that Mitt Romney would be the 45th president of the United States.
Part of the problem for Republicans is their access to information. So many believe that the media in the US is biased against them – dubbed the ‘lamestream’ media by the darling of the right, Sarah Palin – that they turn to right-wing news channels and blogs and radio commentators. In these places, their assumptions are not challenged and alternative views are rarely advanced. Instead, they find comfort in the affirmation and repetition of the things they themselves believe. This has become known as the ‘right-wing bubble’.
On the night of the election in the convention centre in Boston where the Romney team planned to hold its celebration, I spoke to a number of Republicans who simply couldn’t believe the results. At first they thought that there must be something wrong, but then as the reality hit, they thought they knew why Romney had lost. ‘Hurricane Sandy’, they told me ‘stopped Mitt’s momentum’.
It’s been a refrain which has been picked up over the last few days. Hailey Barbour, a respected figure in the Republican movement and a former governor, went on TV and proclaimed ‘Hurricane Sandy saved Barack Obama’s presidency’. Karl Rove – one of George Bush’s key advisors and a man who raised hundreds of millions of dollars from wealthy donors to help Mitt Romney’s campaign – said: ‘If you hadn’t had the storm there would have been more of a chance for the Romney campaign to talk about the deficit, the debt, the economy’. At a breakfast for some of his biggest donors on the morning after the election, Mitt Romney himself suggested Sandy stunted his momentum.
The most consistent poll throughout the election campaign, Ipsos/Reuters, had Barack Obama ahead throughout the campaign. It showed there was no real Romney surge, even after the first debate and there was no suggestion of an Obama bump after the storm.
In the days after the election, there has been a tendency among Republicans to ignore the result. One commentator on Fox News suggested that Obama’s win was a message for him to change course. The Republican leader of the House of Representatives, John Boehner said in his morning-after news conference that he expected the president to cut tax rates and simplify the tax code. He essentially argued that the Romney tax plan should be implemented. The reality is that if you don’t win, you don’t get to introduce your ideas.
If the Republicans continue to believe that they lost simply because of the hurricane, if that narrative is repeated in all the usual places, the party will fail to learn the lessons of the 2012 election. Exit polls say the party is too white, too male and too old to appeal to a modern America. They have to confront the real issues of their loss, and they have to burst the right-wing bubble to do it. If they continue to believe that the approach in four years should be the same ideas and policies but with the hope of better weather, they are almost doomed to repeat the experience of this election.
Alan Fisher is an Al Jazeera correspondent
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