by Gregory Wallace
(CNN) — It’s the season of election post-mortems, and one former Republican National Committee chairman offered his perhaps blunt thoughts about why his party “got outplayed and outflanked” in 2012.
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| FORMER GOP CHAIR–Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele speaks in Washington. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais/File)
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Michael Steele was swept in as the RNC chairman after major GOP losses in 2008, then ousted after some GOP leaders thought the Republicans’ gains in the 2010 midterm elections came in spite of his leadership and at great cost. Some saw him as unconventional and others considered him damaging to the party.
“You can’t put the blinders on and say this was a status quo election,” Steele said at the “Washington Ideas Forum” on Thursday. “This was not a status quo election at all. From the ground game to the get-out-the-vote, to the messaging, nothing was status quo.”
Among the major changes to the political landscape was the influence of super PACs, Steele said, which changed the way money was raised and spent in politics.
Some money that would have gone to party committees was instead contributed to super PACs, he said.
Super PACs, a new type of political action committee that came about after a January 2010 Supreme Court decision, siphoned off money from the political parties and campaigns, Steele said. Those groups primarily funded massive television ad buys, rather than the get-out-the-vote efforts often spearheaded by parties and campaigns.
“The reality of it is, you can run campaign commercials all day long, but you have to get Joe Six Pack off the couch and into the polls,” he said. “The ORCA clearly beached and did not deliver what needed to be delivered.”
ORCA was GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s Election Day get-out-the-vote software that crashed and underperformed, according to numerous news reports, though some accounts quote Romney staffers as saying the program was not a significant part of the candidate’s loss.
Steele also described election year changes to voter laws as “highly stupid.”
“It was highly stupid and it was made up by a lot of ham-handed actions by state legislatures,” he said. “When a voter — however ill-informed or wise they may be in their understanding of the facts before them, if they feel put up on, oppressed, suppressed, or refused the opportunity to participate in the franchise — pull away from it.”
Steele’s criticism builds on recent comments by Republicans, who have sharply warned that the GOP must become more inclusive and adapt to demographic changes in order to stay competitive.
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, appeared alongside on the panel with Steele, and said the Republican Party would not be able to win in the future by simply “running candidates who are brown, Black, and that are female.”
“They’ve gotta change different policies,” he said.
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