Stuart Stevens, chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, spoke with the Harvard Political Review during his visit to the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University.
Harvard Political Review: Is the Mitt Romney who Americans saw in Mitt the same Mitt Romney that Americans saw on the campaign?
Stuart Stevens: I think that there is no one Mitt Romney that people saw on the campaign, and I think people responded to Mitt differently, and it’s very difficult to generalize about the experience that someone had interacting with the presidential campaign. I think it varies as to what your expectations were, what you thought. [The film is] certainly a side of Mitt that we saw a lot of, but we saw a lot that’s not in the film, too. Those are all things that I think are hard to capture in a presidential campaign and that are probably becoming increasingly more difficult to capture.
There’s a whole interesting question, I think, about the interaction between candidates and the press. If you read The Boys on the Bus, the great book about the 1974 campaign, back then they would do much more off-the-record. And now there’s a move against off-the-record. There’s a whole debate in journalism [that] encircles about whether or not that’s ethical. I’m of the opinion that the more time that you can do that sort of stuff, the better it is, because you get a better sense of the person. But I think that now, particularly with everybody having video cameras and there being no private moments, it’s much harder. So I think in some ways, even though we have more coverage now than ever, it’s more difficult in a lot of ways to get a real sense of what the candidates are like. It’s sort of an odd paradox.
HPR: Do you think that sort of dynamic, where you’re not really seeing what the candidates are like, but there’s so much media coverage on them, contributed to some of the issues of the campaign?
Stevens: It’s all difficult, I think, to segment. It’s sort of one giant well that you’re drinking from and it’s hard to say, “Okay, I’m drinking from this part of the well or this part of the well.” You know, it’s very difficult to beat an incumbent president. There’s a great book I really recommend, The Gamble, by two political scientists, John Sides and Lynn Vavreck, and I think it’s the best book written about the campaign. It’s very data-driven.
HPR: As opposed to Double Down?
Stevens: Double Down is very good and I like those guys [Mark Halperin and John Heilemann] a lot, but they’re writing a much more anecdotal, colorful take on it, and try to give you a sense more of what it’s like to be in a campaign. The Gamble is a look much more on why things happened in the campaign. Their modeling of the campaign, which was done in December of 2011 for the first time, had Obama winning with 52.7 percent, and then they put in the actual numbers, and he, I think, got 52.6 percent. So I think that it’s very, very difficult to beat an incumbent president in a perceived improving economy.
HPR: Is there something that you wish you had done on the campaign to change that or to make the strategy more successful?
Stevens: Romney won everybody over 30 by about two points. Our greatest failures were really with Hispanic and African-American voters. We even won young voters who were not Hispanic and not African-American under 30. Clearly the Republican Party has a lot of problems with Hispanic voters, and there’s a good case to be made that the problems of the Republican Party really come down to that.
The fastest growing segment of the population, of the electorate, is not younger voters, it’s not Hispanic voters, it’s older voters, because the country’s getting older and older. And Romney won voters over-65 by 12 points. He won 45-to-65 by three points—which is why I think the White House is doing retirement programs now. We got, what, about 27.5 percent of Hispanic votes? That’s unsustainable. But it’s a lot easier, in theory, to go from 27 to 40 than it is to go from 60 to 80, in the same way as it’s a lot easier for a .150 hitter to become a .250 hitter than for a .250 hitter to become a .400 hitter. So I think, had we been able to do more with Hispanic voters, it would have obviously been beneficial. And, had we been able to win the nomination earlier, it would have been very beneficial.
HPR: Do you think that a shorter primary season would have worked in your favor?
Stevens: Definitely. And having the Convention earlier. Because you can’t access, under the law, general election money until you’re the nominee. And this was the first incumbent president since Nixon who hadn’t taken federal funding, which is a huge advantage for an incumbent president. I’ve really become a great advocate of public financing, and having been involved in the Bush campaigns when we did public financing and [the Romney] campaigns where we didn’t, I think it’s a great detriment to the public good not to have public financing. For these candidates to be raising money in September and October, I think, is bad all the way around.
And the pressures to raise money at over $100 million a month after you get the nomination, it’s just extraordinary, and I think it’s very detrimental and negative. You’re now going to have a move to get conventions earlier, because the only reason we moved them late was that when you’re receiving public money, you’re going to get the same amount of money regardless of how many days you have. So we pushed it as late as we could, so that we would have more money to spend in a shorter, concentrated period of time. That hung over to 2012, but then neither candidate was taking public financing, so it was sort of like a legacy of a system that was no longer. So I think the convention will be in July now, which I think makes a lot more sense. I just think it’s better.
HPR: In a 2013 editorial for the Washington Post, you said that the GOP has an opportunity to win the “generational battle” in future elections, and you cite potential younger presidential candidates like Paul Ryan, Susana Martinez, Marco Rubio, and Chris Christie to run against likely old guard candidates like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in 2016. But there seemed to be a farther push to the right in the 2012 primary battle. Is this argument affected by the right flank of the Republican Party?
Stevens: The classic rule of thumb is that those who are most interested, in both the Democratic and the Republican side, tend to be those who are either more liberal or more conservative. So I think that it’s a challenge. I don’t think it’s a particularly new challenge.
We tend to think contradictory things. We think on the one hand the Republican Party is very homogeneous and then we say there’s a civil war in the Republican Party and nobody can get along. Both of those can’t exist. It’s what they said about Bush, you know, that Bush was just this empty vessel that was filled by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, or that Bush was incredibly strong-willed and it was his way or the highway. I can believe one, I can believe the other, I just can’t believe them both. I think that the ability to deal with those different factions in the party is a challenge for everybody. It was a challenge for Obama—it dragged out until June. But if you look at Mitt Romney, one of the things about that that’s interesting is, increasingly the Republican Party is Southern, evangelical, and populist, and he’s not Southern, he’s not evangelical, and he went to Harvard. So the fact that he was able to win the nomination I think is very interesting.
You’ve never had a situation where there’s an incumbent president, the [opposition] party nominated someone who was a generation older, and that person won. It always goes to incumbent, always goes to a younger generation, and it’s sort of a passing of the torch, you would pass the torch to younger generations, not to older generations. And if Hillary Clinton is the nominee it will be a passing to an older generation. That will be very unusual. And personally I tend to believe that history patterns happen for a reason. You’ve never had a Democratic frontrunner have an easy time getting a nomination. What I’ve learned is that whatever I think is going to happen won’t happen, but it tends to be very predictive that there will be a fight for that nomination, even though we look at it right now and we say, “Hillary Clinton’s getting 99.9 percent.”
It would be very unusual for there not to be some element that will come in and challenge her, and maybe they won’t be successful, maybe they will. But you could have a situation where the candidates as a whole on the Republican Party are considerably younger and a different generation than Hillary Clinton.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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