It looks like Obama is going to get his second term.
Of course there is a chance that Obama could somehow lose Wisconsin and Pennsylvania even as he wins Ohio. Or there is a chance that somehow the polls in Ohio are all wrong for a reason we will only discover after the campaign. But Ohio is the key state and Romney has never really achieved anything like a lead there. Tim Carney at the Washington Examiner has laid out his forecasting and he comes to the sensible result of Obama 290, Romney 248. I think he is right that Obama won’t break 300. For a looser take on things that argues for a Romney win, look to Jay Cost at The Weekly Standard.
Everyone will take what they want from a Romney defeat. Democrats will exult in a demographic shift that is favoring them with every election. Social conservatives will say that Romney never excited the base. Elite conservatives will castigate the party for not making efforts to attract and win over more Hispanic voters. Social liberals in the Republican party will blame the “war on women” and the incessant chatter about contraception and rape. Hard-core restrictionists will argue that Republicans failed to maximize their appeal to alienated white voters. Anti-war conservatives will say that Romney didn’t sufficiently repudiate the deeply unpopular Bush legacy and voters were afraid of blowing up the world again. Post-election analysts want their political coalition to become more like themselves.
But the truth is that the election was winnable for Republicans and perhaps several of the above strategies could have paid off. But Romney’s history, his personality, and his campaign were not suited to winning a national race during a bad economic downturn. He is one of the most intensely “disliked” presidential candidates in a long time. He is not a natural campaigner.
Bob Jones 
Charles Cosimano 
MBunge 
Chad 
JonF 
Sharculese 
Clint 
KateLE 
Scott McConnell 
Hill People 
Jack 
Klde 
Gerard 
Daniel Baker 
Not sure how much of the flaws of the campaign we can chalk up to Romney’s personality.
As Seth Masket pointed out, “[A]ny Republican presidential nominee today would have to be a serious flip-flopper. … No one taking the stances Romney needed to take to win this year could have had the sort of résumé needed to be a typical major party nominee. … Almost no one taking the stances that Romney is taking now could have been elected as a senator or a governor from most states just a few years ago. … Rapid polarization makes flip-flopping a necessity.”
Longstanding, constructive conservative attempts to address real-life issues– like the EITC, housing vouchers, the individual health insurance mandate, cap and trade, etc.– suddenly became anathema to the GOP. That’s because being a Republican is about resenting perceived outsiders, not about coming up with rational policies related to anything going on in the real world. The vast bulk of our deficit problem was caused by GOP decisions in the Bush era; Republicans responded by nominating Romney, who promises Bush redux on domestic & foreign policy, and Paul Ryan, who actually voted for all the policies that caused the deficit.
Romney knows all this, and acts accordingly. He wrote in the summer of 2009 that “we established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance. Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages “free riders” to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others. This doesn’t cost the government a single dollar.” He said in June 2009 that Wyden-Bennett, which contained an individual mandate, was a plan “that a number of Republicans think is a very good health-care plan—one that we support.” And it was accurate at the time.
He artfully worded both statements, recognizing the then-universal consensus that an individual mandate would be part of a bipartisan compromise, without actually coming out in support of anything.
Smart, or he could have been torpedoed in the primary. He relied on the primaries on the “Obama’s a foreigny outsider who apologizes to foreigners” line of rationale, which he stuck to until the first debate against the president started.
The GOP had a choice of an artful flip-flopper like Romney, an artless flip-flopper like Perry or Santorum or Gingrich (or Paul Ryan or John Thune), or a guns-blazing ignoramus outsider like Bachmann or Cain or Trump.
In addition to his Clintonian parsing, Romney has a reassuring speaking voice and good hair. Mitt Romney is the absolute best that today’s Republican Party can hope for.