Authors: Michael Kranish,Scott Helman
On January 3, 2008, the day of the Iowa caucuses, Romney’s campaign aides had a target that they believed would bring them victory: 25,000 votes. They were initially overjoyed as it became clear that they would exceed the goal, eventually garnering 30,021. But as the evening wore on, the Romney team’s confidence—some would call it hubris—proved to be misplaced. The overall turnout far exceeded their estimates, and Huckabee wound up with 40,954 votes, vastly outdistancing Romney.
Richard Schwarm, the former Iowa Republican Party chairman and senior adviser to the Romney campaign, was convinced that anti-Mormonism had played a major role in Romney’s defeat. “There are a lot of Iowans who view themselves as not bigoted but just don’t believe that Mormon is a Christian religion,” Schwarm said. “Or worse, I heard lots of times, ‘I’m not a bigot, but my aunt and sister are.’ ” Myers said anti-Mormonism in Iowa “was a major issue” and that—despite warnings from the campaign’s Iowa team—she hadn’t initially realized what a big role evangelicals would play. Had she understood the extent of their influence, she said, Romney would have deemphasized the state. “If we had known that there would have been 110,000 caucus goers, with a majority of those being evangelical Christians, I would have thought that would have been a tough situation for Mitt to win.” (The actual Republican turnout was 119,188.)
It was a remarkable statement. Evangelical power had long been the story of the Iowa caucuses. How could Romney, the man with a passion for data and details, have so underestimated it? More amazing, how could his Boston political team? In short, Romney’s Iowa strategy had been a disaster. Instead of coming into New Hampshire with unstoppable momentum, he was struggling to keep his candidacy alive. Still, some of the fundamentals seemed good: he was well known throughout the state, had a home there, and faced few questions about his religion. But the campaign had failed to heed the advice of some of its staff in New Hampshire, and now the state seemed to be slipping from Romney’s grasp.
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eeks before the New Hampshire primary, U.S. Senator Judd Gregg, Romney’s national cochairman, had traveled to Boston for a briefing at campaign headquarters. Settling into a seat in a conference room, Gregg listened to Romney’s advisers describe how easily the candidate was going to win the New Hampshire primary and the nomination. Gregg was shocked. From his years of experience, he knew all too well how a candidate could gain or lose twenty polling points in New Hampshire in a matter of days, earthquake-type shifts that depended on momentum and emotion. Yet here were Romney’s aides, with their quantitative analysis and polling charts—the “quant,” as Gregg called it—insisting that the nomination was all but sealed. “The pollsters were absolutely sure Romney would be the next president of the United States. I thought it was an absurdly ‘quantish’ view of the campaign,” Gregg said. “I can just remember walking out of the room shaking my head.” He felt out of sync with the campaign of which he was national cochairman. He appeared at some events and sometimes introduced Romney, but he was otherwise mostly shut out of the decision making. The Romney campaign “didn’t want me or my organization to do anything,” and, he said, he didn’t try to push his way into the inner circle. Asked why a campaign wouldn’t take advantage of one of the most experienced political operations in New Hampshire, Gregg responded with a single word: “Ego.” He explained, “In these campaigns, people tend to be very resistant to outsiders. So my decision was not to get involved in how to run their campaign because they didn’t appear to want to know.”
Bruce Keough, the chairman of Romney’s New Hampshire campaign who had been wooed so strongly by the candidate at a North End restaurant, decided on a far more aggressive approach. For months, he had been frustrated that the Boston team wasn’t listening to concerns raised by him and others who knew best what was happening on the ground. The campaign held conference calls with staff in the key states, but they were mostly one-sided, he said, with Romney aides providing a briefing on their latest plans. Moreover, after having been courted strongly by Romney, Keough had had little chance for interaction with the candidate. Throughout the entire New Hampshire campaign, he said, he’d had only two brief opportunities to ride with Romney in his car as he traveled across New Hampshire. He said Romney preferred to travel with only an aide, press secretary Eric Fehrnstrom. “His preference in traveling between events in New Hampshire was to be alone with Eric in the car and not use those gaps in his schedule as opportunity” to learn what was happening in the state, “and I thought it was curious,” Keough said. He was frustrated that Romney didn’t apply “the old adage about management by walking around. If you want to know how things are going on the factory floor, go talk to the factory workers.” Keough fired off a memo to Myers and Bob White, Romney’s close friend and associate from Bain Capital. He recapped the problems with the campaign and argued that Romney had to hammer away at a message of fiscal discipline. He never learned if Romney had seen the memo.
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omney was careening in the wrong direction and time was running short. A campaign memo had warned the candidate that the early primaries would be a “rocket sled process, 2 1/2 weeks, little time for adjustments.” Usually, there had been at least a week between voting in Iowa and New Hampshire. This time there were only five days.
Huckabee now posed a real challenge on Romney’s right. Not only had the Romney campaign failed to anticipate Huckabee’s strength in Iowa, but it also hadn’t thought he would go all-out in New Hampshire. Myers later said she had thought Huckabee would skip New Hampshire—where social conservatives are not nearly as important as in many other states—and go directly to South Carolina, which held the South’s first primary. “I was surprised [Huckabee] went to New Hampshire.” But Huckabee’s ascent prompted his campaign chairman, Ed Rollins, to fly into New Hampshire, three weeks before Huckabee won Iowa, making it clear that his candidate would campaign across the Granite State. “We are going to be full bore here,” he said in Concord, the state capital.
Worse, Romney faced new trouble on the left. The Romney campaign plan had counted on McCain and Giuliani splitting the moderate vote. But Giuliani was waging a surprisingly poor campaign. Never popular with the party’s conservative wing, which disapproved of his stance in favor of abortion rights, Giuliani was having trouble gaining support when a series of reports hurt his image among voters. Stories surfaced that the former New York City mayor had billed the city for a security detail at times when he was visiting a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Around the same time, his former police commissioner Bernard Kerik, whom Giuliani had recommended as the secretary of homeland security, was indicted on tax-related federal charges.
Wayne Semprini, the chairman of Giuliani’s New Hampshire campaign, had believed the state was tailor-made for his candidate. Voters weren’t fazed by Giuliani’s support of abortion rights and liked his position as a fiscal conservative and strong leader. At the beginning of the campaign, Semprini, the former chairman of the state’s Republican Party, had mapped out an ambitious advertising budget for Giuliani, convinced that the former New York City mayor could win the state and use it as a launching pad to victory. Now Semprini wanted to make his move. As he drove in a campaign car with Giuliani, he told the candidate that the time had come to make a major television advertising push in New Hampshire. Giuliani picked up his cell phone and, as Semprini recalled it, ordered an aide at New York headquarters to start running the ads. Semprini was thrilled. But the expected ad blitz never came. Semprini was later told by a Giuliani aide that the campaign didn’t have the money; that was why Giuliani was spending so little time in New Hampshire and so much time running around the country raising funds.
The Romney campaign was aghast that Giuliani was pulling back in New Hampshire. It had believed all along that it needed Giuliani to do reasonably well in order to draw support away from McCain. Now the McCain campaign seized on Giuliani’s collapse, telling voters that a vote for the former mayor was effectively a vote for Romney. “When Rudy stopped advertising in New Hampshire, that was one of the worst days in our campaign,” Myers said later. McCain, deemed all but dead a few months earlier, was gaining momentum in New Hampshire. He was once again at his most comfortable, spending most of his time at town meetings and talking to voters.
Romney struggled as he tried to match McCain’s success in connecting with voters, and his every utterance came under scrutiny. Asked about his lack of foreign policy experience in the wake of the assassination of former Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto, Romney responded, “The President is not an expert. The president is a leader who guides America in making the important decisions which must be made to keep us safe.” After he said he had seen his father march with the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., the assertion was questioned and he backed away from it.
Romney knew he had to change his message. Five days before the New Hampshire primary, he sat in his Portsmouth hotel room, took out a yellow legal pad, and sketched out a theme: “Washington is broken.” The subtext was that only an outsider could bring real change. It would be Romney’s mantra for the rest of the campaign and would be revived for the 2012 effort. But Romney’s opponents, sensing that his carefully constructed campaign was coming unglued, pounded him the following night at a January 5 debate at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. McCain mocked Romney’s effort to describe himself as the candidate of change. “I agree, you are the candidate of change,” McCain said, alluding to Romney’s change of positions on various issues. When Romney charged that McCain had supported a plan that granted amnesty to illegal immigrants, McCain said there were penalties involved and quoted Romney as having previously said the plan was “reasonable and was not amnesty.” McCain then used the exchange as a vehicle to portray Romney as a rich liar: “You can spend your whole fortune on these attack ads, but it . . . won’t be true.”
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n the morning of the January 8 New Hampshire primary, Romney’s top campaign staff gathered at headquarters in Manchester. Even as the vote came in, the consultants and pollsters talked at length about Romney’s message and his “brand.” Keough, the New Hampshire campaign chairman, could not believe what he was hearing. A year earlier, he had attended a similar meeting in Boston at which all of Romney’s staff had discussed the need to settle on a message. Now, as the same debate rattled through the headquarters on Elm Street, the frustrated Keough could take no more.
“What have you people been doing for the last year?” he demanded, bristling.
As he looked around, the problem seemed obvious. It was, as one aide put it, the “Noah’s Ark campaign.” There were two of everything, it seemed, including the competing media teams. The Romney campaign spin had been that the candidate loved the creative tension, but Keough had noticed a change in the candidate’s attitude since the Iowa loss. “Mitt was a little less certain that he had the best campaign that money could buy,” he said. That night, election returns showed that McCain had beaten Romney in New Hampshire by a margin of 37 to 32 percent.
Romney had one last chance, his advisers believed, to return to the original idea of campaigning as Mr. Fix-it. Echoing the Obama campaign, he would promise to bring change to Washington. The emphasis on social issues would be lowered, if not dropped. As the New Hampshire results came in, Romney sent an e-mail to Castellanos, saying he had at last latched onto the message the adviser had long been pressing on him. “Alex. Well, change was it—just like you said from the beginning,” Romney wrote. “Never found a better word for it. Change it is. And change we will have—soon. Hope for the better . . . Mitt.” But now money was an unexpected concern. After giving millions of dollars of his own money, Romney was nearing the limit of how much he was willing to contribute out of his fortune. The financial need, however, was great. There were upcoming primaries in Michigan, Nevada, and South Carolina. Romney’s campaign believed it could win with an economic message in Romney’s birth state of Michigan and easily win in Nevada, which has a large Mormon population. He did go on to win both of those states.
The question was whether it was worth following through on his initial vow to go all-out in South Carolina. As Romney struggled over such questions of strategy, his frustrations with the direction of his campaign surfaced in one of his rare public displays of anger. With his plane grounded by a snowstorm, he held an impromptu news conference at a Staples store in South Carolina. As he took his position in front of a rack of ballpoint pens, reporters scrambled for position. Associated Press reporter Glen Johnson (who subsequently joined
The
Boston Globe
) nabbed a seat on the floor in order to plug his laptop into a nearby outlet. Johnson listened as Romney sought to contrast himself to his opponents, saying, “I don’t have lobbyists running my campaign, I don’t have lobbyists that are tied to my—”
“That is not true, Governor, that is not true,” Johnson interjected from his ground-level position. He had been traveling on the Romney campaign plane and knew that one of the best-known lobbyists in Washington, Ron Kaufman, was a valued Romney strategist. “Ron Kaufman’s a lobbyist.”
Romney angrily denied that Kaufman was running his campaign. “Did you hear what I said, Glen, did you hear what I said? I said I don’t have lobbyists running my campaign, and he’s not running my campaign.” He did acknowledge, however, that Kaufman was “an adviser.” Fuming, he kept up the argument, denying that Kaufman had participated in “senior strategy sessions,” but under further questioning from Johnson, he seemed to contradict himself by acknowledging that Kaufman had helped him in debate preparation sessions. Still, the incident might have passed without further notice had Romney, piqued at his loss of message control, not sought out Johnson after the press conference. A videographer caught the confrontation as the candidate got close to Johnson’s face. “Listen to my words,” Romney said. Then it was the turn of Fehrnstrom, Romney’s ever-protective press secretary, who chastised Johnson for “being argumentative with the candidate. It’s out of line. You’re out of line.”