Talk politics.

"Cash is, at best, #3 in the list of what's important in an election, especially a special election:

1) The ideas and/or the candidate: No amount of money can make a good candidate bad, no amount of money will make an unpopular idea worthwhile.

2) Ground game: At the end of the day, going door-to-door costs a campaign nothing but volunteer time. Phones are relatively cheap. If you have a good candidate with a good idea, this, not money, is what swings votes - getting people out.

3) Cash: this is when cash might matter - when a ground game is relatively equal, when the candidates are both credible, and, most importantly, when there are undecided voters to swing.
On a personal level, I more or less abandoned this entire concept in the general election, and it's no wonder why I was mostly blindsided following the polls coming back on Monday following the Hurricane. These are all true things that I completely forgot about, and they have very firm applications to the Romney/Obama scenario in retrospect.

1) The ideas and/or the candidate: This is probably #1 why I assumed, early on, that this would be an easy row for any Republican: because I assumed that Obama's popularity was such that my jerk of a cat could have run and gotten 50%. Oh, how very, very wrong I was.

First, Obama's favorability always overperformed relative to his approval until late - people liked Obama even if they didn't like how he was doing. The assumption that favorability would end up down with his approval was a bad one - the reverse ended up happening, instead. Obama ended up being the candidate that was the good one here, even though the gap was narrowed on favorability.

With that said, what happened with Romney? He surely made up the gap in favorability, and still came two million votes short. Obama, as likable as those polled found him, appears to have lost nine million votes from 2008->2012. What happened? Romney allowed himself to be defined as out of touch throughout the summer, and while a good debate performance nuked that premise, it can be argued that the damage was done there, and Obama, in retrospect, ensured that he'd be better.

At the end of the day, however, both candidates were credible alternatives. It's just a shame that the Republicans fell flat on the other key issue, ideas. Without a conservative standard-bearer, there was no clear articulation of actual conservative ideas, instead going with the wishy-washy centrism that has been killing the Republicans electorally for 3 of the last 4 cycles. This means that the Republicans had to rely even harder on the next metric:

2) Ground Game: I found this article from the Washington Post to be very telling, especially in regards to the contrast it provides to the recall election. Scott Walker's recall campaign was run so well, with such a good ground game, that I assumed Wisconsin was at least in play. All the reports leading up were that Romney was killing it in early voting, that identifications were up, that the GOTV operation was significantly higher than in 2008.

Instead, Romney may end up with fewer votes than John McCain received.

The WaPo article is really a great detail of exactly how the Obama campaign destroyed the Republicans on GOTV efforts. While it wasn't as obvious on the ground (anecdotally, the Warren people a) had a distinct human advantage to the Brown people and b) coordinated very well with the Obama campaign, compared to the Brown campaign's almost complete disconnect with the national RNC until the final days, and with no significant coordination with Romney), the technology increases, the easy way to target their voters through social media and electronic devices, it absolutely caught the Republicans off-guard. They thought they had caught up with Obama in this regard - instead, they only caught up to Obama circa-2008.

Even if Obama was clearly the worse candidate for the public at large, this ground game advantage absolutely benefited him, especially in Ohio and Virginia, but most notably in Wisconsin, where the Republicans were better situated and better organized than perhaps ever before.

This means we need to ask about the third line item:

3) Cash: Given the Citizens United ruling, one would have expected this to be a bigger issue if you were assuming money = victory. With the PAC spending added in, the two parties appear to be about even, last minute donations and expenditures excepted. With advantages in ground game and candidate value, the Obama campaign didn't need the type of money it had in 2008, and almost certainly benefited from the already-available staff and infrastructure it had in place from 2008, resulting in fewer necessary expenditures. At the end of the day, the Romney cash advantage toward the end of the campaign did nothing to bridge this gap, nor, in retrospect, could it have. It's just another page in the book of evidence regarding how cash isn't the be-all end-all to win an election.

How could Romney have improved on this? He could have used his cash better to fight back against the way Obama defined him during the summer. The RNC could have done a better job recruiting a worthwhile candidate that the base would have gotten behind. When a candidate is good and exemplifies the ideals that the base wants, they come out to volunteer - something the Republicans certainly did more of than in 2008 (more than halving the vote deficit), but clearly not enough to get their base folks out. I would even make a guess that we'll learn, in the aftermath, that Romney barely pursued the base at all, assuming they'd simply come out based on anti-Obama sentiment alone.

But I guess the overriding facts insist, facts I recognized years ago and facts that held yet again, when you have a lesser candidate, and a lesser ground game, and you misuse your resources, you lose your election. And over the next four years, we'll all be suffering as a result.