On Tuesday night, President Barack Obama was re-elected to a second term, winning an overwhelming electoral victory over Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
While Democrats celebrate, however, Republicans must begin to pick up the pieces and determine what went wrong. While there are plenty of good, reasonable explanations for Obama’s victory, Republicans are far more likely to jump head first into the finger-pointing that tends to follow electoral defeat.
Here are five things that Republicans are certain to blame for Romney’s defeat in the coming days:
Superstorm Sandy
Almost immediately after Sandy struck the East Coast, Republicans began to complain that the devastation would boost President Obama’s re-election hopes. “If you hadn’t had the storm, there would have been more of a chance for the Romney campaign to talk about the deficit, the debt, the economy,” Karl Rove said on Saturday.
Now that Romney has lost, expect more Republicans to complain that nobody would’ve worried about Romney’s leadership or his plans to eliminate FEMA if not for that pesky hurricane.
(AP Photo/Doug Mills, Pool)
Chris Christie
Republicans are also certain to blame New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who praised President Obama in Sandy’s wake, said that he didn’t “give a damn” if Romney came to New Jersey to survey the damage, and turned down Romney’s request to appear at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend.
The conservative backlash to Christie has already begun; News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch warned last Friday that Christie “must re- declare for Romney, or take blame for next four dire years,” and Rush Limbaugh blasted Christie as “fat” and a “fool.”
(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Black Panthers
As they did in 2008, Fox News (and other elements of the right wing) will likely complain about intimidation by the New Black Panther Party. Legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. got things started on Election Day, when he warned that a member who was smiling and holding the door for two women was “intimidating” in “some kind of semi-military pose.”
The Lamestream Media
Whenever anything goes poorly for the Republicans, many right-wingers conclude that the media’s “liberal bias” is to blame. Although a Pew study concluded that Romney received more positive coverage than President Obama throughout the final month of the campaign, many Republicans are certain to conclude that Romney’s defeat had nothing to do with his policies, or with the American people — it’s all due to the same old “lamestream media” and its “gotcha questions.”
(AP Photo)
Mitt Romney
Ultimately, Republicans will blame Romney’s loss on Romney himself. After all, many conservatives never liked Romney from day one; now that he’s lost, expect a long round of “I told you so”s from the right-wingers who didn’t trust the one-time “Massachusetts moderate” in the first place.
(AP Photo/Steven Senne)
