The Pros And Cons Of The 2012 Presidential Campaign

The 2012 presidential campaign was a very rocky campaign for the candidates of both parties all the way up to Election Day. In particular Mitt Romney’s campaign was filled with many gaffes that had a huge impact on his campaign which at some points ended alienating the members of his own party. Despite President Obama being seen as the underdog because of the fact that he was running a campaign in the midst of a slowly recovering economy he was able to claim victory in the end. Overall the 2012 Presidential campaign was filled with many campaign decision and gaffes that ended up causing harm to both sides of the race but it is Mitt Romney’s campaign decisions in particular that ended up causing the most publicity and therefore the most negative

Romney was very well understood by friends and family to be a very private person and someone who did not enjoy revealing too much about himself in public. This means that early on voters did not have a very good idea of what kind of person would be taking on the job as president. His campaign feared that unless Romney opened up about himself he would be defined as a canny man with a large amount of wealth who could not relate to the average citizen. Predictably this led to giving Obama an advantage early on by being able to define Romney negatively in campaign ads. Without any view on what kind of person Romney is the Obama campaign was able to negatively define Romney themselves and make him out to be a member of the elite with no ties to the average

According to “The Gamble” Sides and Vavdeck contend that most voters take the same view that reflects their own partisanship and that their decision is usually made well before Election Day. A study showed that the stability of vote intentions stayed consistent form December 2011 to April 2012. Over the span of four months a Gallop poll found that 90% of people from both parties stayed loyal to their vote intention. Furthermore, even independents usually lean closer toward one party in particular so these too are usually hard to sway. However, especially for those who are undecided it has been proven that voters are most conscious to recent events and usually don’t take in the bigger picture when deciding who to vote for. Given that Romney’s very public gaffe occurred mere weeks before Election Day means that this event had a noticeable impact on the victor. The 47 percent gaffe solidified the notion that Romney was not really a man of the people who supported the average American but instead a man of the Elite with interests aligned with the upper class. This recent gaffe left Romney unable to fully recover and thus this image was fresh in the mind of voters going to the polls on Election