What should be Romney post-conventions strategy?

[old timey villain]

Romney made the fatal mistake of assuming that every presidential election is merely a referendum on the incumbent or incumbent party. They're not. They're a choice Americans make between two people, with two different plans. Obama has a plan, and he has outlined that in the DNC. What is Romney's plan that he can sell to the American people? "I'm not Obama and will do the same stuff Bush did" is not cutting it.

My advice to Romney (which I hope he does not take) is to craft a compelling narrative about where he will take the country once he takes office. Give us a road map based on new ideas and policies. Stop cowering under the far right influences in your party. They'll vote for you anyway. Become your own man and seize control. And for god's sake stop being so shady with the press. Answer their questions and be open.

[Marokai Backbeat]

Romney's strategy has thusfar been to present himself as such a generic candidate that disaffected and swing voters can then project their own opinions onto him and see what they want to see. That's a nice strategy for getting a solid polling floor, but the tradeoff is that it's virtually impossible to create any enthusiasm for yourself (as we saw during the RNC) and when things get too specific the facade starts to fall apart.

As more attention is placed on Romney and the debates near, he has to become, well, an actual candidate with an actual vision proposing actual policies, not just a blank slate that can trick people into projecting their Romney vision in place of an actual Romney vision. That strategy doesn't work unless your opponent is completely dead in the water and has no ideas of his own, either. Obama isn't, and he does. Romney is going to have a much worse chance of winning as a Nothing candidate.

[Lincoln Republican]

Go dirtier than Obama.

Romney would never stoop that low.

Besides, it would be impossible for anyone to go dirtier than Obama.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Having a natural affinity for the underdog, I'd like to think about what Romney should do to win. However, the problem seems to be that the main obstacle preventing Romney from doing that is Romney himself. Even without all of his gaffes, he is simply a terrible candidate for virtually every swing state.

The only idea I can think of that would give him a Hail Mary would be to repudiate the Ryan budget proposal and instead call for dramatic cuts in military spending to make incremental cuts to social spending more palatable. Obama would be unable to successfully attack him on this for much the same reason Romney has been unable to attack Obama on foreign policy. Obama could attack Romney for flip-flopping, but given Romney's reputation I hardly think this would do any marginal damage. Of course, Romney's a hyper-militarist so this would never happen.

The Ryan plan isn't what is going to kill him. What is killing him is the second tax plan he released before the MI primary. He should have stuck to the broad outline from the 59 point plan that provided answers for more pressing tax decisions, and ended with a call for a long term reform plan lowering rates and removing deductions. But in MI he released specifics on the lowering the rates, and left the removing deductions blank. No the numbers don't add up and when you add them up for him the situation gest worse (see Clinton speech, he can either... or he can... The one part I saw of it, ironically).

He needs to show some flexibility/willingess to compromise on the specifics of the tax plan, provided that it lowers rates and the tax burden remains relatively the same. He just has to be careful to provide some room for revenue increases once in office, though. That will free him from his pre-MI plan without having to repudiate it directly and at the same time show that a willingess to compromise and look at alternatives that may be a better idea.

The then needs to hammer his five point plan, hard in the debates and advertising.

Finally, he needs to articulate a "sensible" regulation package to replace Dodd-Frank with, otherwise Obama will just keep hamering him about returning to the Bush years. Romney needs to be seen as offering an alternative path forward, not back to the future.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Romney should have rejected the hardcore fundie wing of the party in the first place and appealed to one of the big groups Republicans have been shedding; suburban white-collars. If he ran an economically conservative and socially moderate (not socially far-right and trying to make people ignore it), he'd be doing far better in Virginia, Colorado, and New Hampshire. However, the fact that his campaign has decided to turn off both Rustbelt blue-collars and Mid-Atlantic white-collars is great for us Democrats.

He went too far on too many occassions to endear himself to the right with little to no gains. A good example of this was the MS personhood amendment, and other items. But openly rejecting the Conservatives, particularly the social ones would have rendered him as viable as Huntsman. He had to appeal to them to stand a chance in hell in the primary. But he should have been far more strategic and kept a solid eye on how he could later deal with each of them in the general.

[Ljube]

For the last four months Romney's popularity, favorability, support, vote percentage has steadily improved, while Obama's has stagnated or decreased. The race was Obama +4 in May and it's tied now. This is huge in a polarized electorate.

Romney needs to keep doing what he has been doing so far and he will score a victory in November. He needs to avoid losing in the debates, but that's going to be easier for him due to low expectations everybody has for his performance.

If he can score a major blow, such as release his tax returns in early October, his chances would improve greatly.