Mitchell Reports   |  December 06, 2012

The 2012 campaign that was

There were many lessons during the 2012 campaign such as the importance of the Hispanic vote, the role of Super PACs and the use of micro-targeting but what were some of the more delusional moments of the campaign? Politico’s David Catanese discusses.

Share This:

This content comes from Closed Captioning that was broadcast along with this program.

>>> there were many lessons learned from the 2012 presidential came, importance of the hispanic vote and microtargeting. what were the delusional moments of the campaign? joining me is dave cantonese. a story in politico, i loved it. i want to do two, there are ten, people can read it, the first one is, the ames straw poll is relevant. that wound up not being true, why?

>> i mean you,ed have had all of the advisers at post election conference saying it wasn't. michele bachmann put a ton of time, resources and that didn't turn into anything, as you well know. the governor has said it's irrelevant we should move beyond it. when you have governor of the party saying we should move beyond it and the top consultants on the last campaign saying, yeah it doesn't matter, you know, i think it's probably losing its significance.

>> michele bachmann won the ames straw poll and finished sixth, sixth in the iowa caucuses . the other one i thought was right on, saving money to advertise in october is a good idea. turns out not, why?

>> this, i think, could have the most lasting impact going forward that will be interesting to see in 2016 . as you well know, the obama campaign made an early decision to define mitt romney in may and june, coming out of the primary. went right into the states, sort of framing him as a plutocrat who didn't care about the middle class , mitt romney campaign reserved time for the fall, put $20 million into the fall but he was already defined. it ended up being too late. so the lesson is, going forward in 2016 , will the real ad war begin in may and june and we're not waiting anymore for post-convention labor day schedule.

>> another point, you're exactly right, another point that's important, mitt romney , the primarily took more out of him than people realized in terms of money he wound up having donors maxed out couldn't do anything until he became the nominee.