Republicans reboot, play blame game after Election Day defeat

>>> get an assortment of martha stewart living ornaments , republicans. gop officials tell "the washington post " they are planning a series of voter-based polls and focus groups and talking with volunteers, donors and staff members trying to find ways to broaden their appeal after being shocked by tuesday's results. and the blame game continues. american cross roads founder karl rove under fire from donors and party officials for the lack of results trying to divert attention by taking aim at the president.

>> he succeeded by suppressing the e vote. by saying to people you may not like who i am and i know you can't bring yourself to vote for me, but i'm going to paint him as a rich guy that only cares about himself.

>> let's bring in the communications director and former press secretary for the congressional committee and msnbc political analyst and communications director karen finney, good morning to you both. jonathan , senator chuck schumer fired back at what karl rove just said there. take a look.

>> karl rove 's reputation is going to take a significant hit. if cross roads were a business and rove was the ceo he'd be fired for getting a poor return for his investors.

>> the senator went on to say that american cross roads will be less of a factor in the midterms. jonathan , is he write?

>> he's not at all. we have been talking to a lot of donors. everyone who is disappointed with results fully understands the contribution that we had in the 2012 election. the critical thing that gets lost with all of this analysis is that the president did a very, very good job of raising a lot of money. he outspent by 154 million in tv ads. and mitt romney was buying all his ad time late when meant he was buying higher prices. a lot of the outside groups were balancing out a really good and well-executed campaign by the president. but one where they had a disadvantage.

>> i heard that from a lot of republicans that it it would have been worse had the money not gone to places.

>> well argue with the numbers then.

>> that's a great spin and i have been in your position, exactly that position so i feel for you. but let's be honest about what happened in this election. what happened in this election is that the voter suppression tactics that the republicans tried to put in place did not work. in fact, it had an inverse effect that it angered african-american and latino voters they were determined to stand in lines eight hours just to early vote . on top of that, yes, the president's campaign had a masterful turnout operation -- based frankly, and this is the irony of all this, there's a bit of karma, this is the guy who in 2004 was bragging about the 72-hour plan and microtargeting and how he knew all the voters he had to turn out. there was no reason why on the republican side you couldn't have had that kind of operation. it was there. the technology was there. howard dean my former boss was honest about the fact we were trying to imlate a lot of those concepts and ideas. we had a superior campaign and candidate. but also when you talk about the amount of spending, the amount of outside money your organization and others spent against this president and against some of our candidates like a sherrod brown who was outspent 3 to 1 and still re prevailed says a lot about the strength of our message and the inadequacy of trying to use anger points to motivate people, trying to use hate to motivate people and having a message about this country and inclusive of everyone.

>> six of the eight candidates you supported did lose along with mitt romney . foster frieze said too much money was spent on advertising. donald trump tweeted that karl rove should be fired. did you make mistakes in how you spent the money?

>> i want to address something that karen said. i don't know of any ads that were hateful. go and look at them on our youtube channel . that's a lot of spin right over there. on the senate side, we did and i'll be the first person to admit have problems on the recruitment side. over the last two election cycles, republicans lost at least six senate seats not because of bad messaging coming from our party, but we had candidates outraised and not ready for the platform that a senate candidate where there's an enormous amount of scrutiny. so instead of cutting the debt and taxes we ended up on a lot of other issues that should never have been debated because we had weak candidates.

>> let e me ask you the big picture candidate. billions of dollars spent and we ended up not that far off from where we started with barack obama ahead. are people going to look at this when we have a little distance and take a breath and is this going to change the way money is donated going forward? or the suggestion from jonathan is that the donors are happy and it's going to be more of the same?

>> i hope we do. consider $50 billion in damages now that we're looking at the superstorm sandy. how disgusting is that? i do like the fact that at the end of the day what motored the most is individual votes which overpowered the money spent. donors will on both sides have some frustration about the amount of money that was spent and was that effective? at a point, i don't think people cared about the television advertising . it was too much. and i think we have a real problem with money in politics. it's going to become part of the conversation going forward. maybe campaigns will look at how they spend the money in terms of ground game and other ways to reach voters instead of so much on advertising and negative advertising and sort of lying about things like welfare and the other kinds of things. but i certainly think we need to reign in the amount of money being spent.

>> if television ads weren't effective, he wouldn't have outspent mitt romney . there are things that outside groups can do. we run a lot of ads.

>> you guys think you lost this on television ads ? you're in for a two two years, my friend.

>> the debate will continue. thanks to both of you.