So I doubt much of anyone would disagree that Romney would be preferable as president over Trump. Yet the treatment of Romney in 2012 showed to many that no Republican would get a fair chance from the media.
I’m not saying that Romney needed to win, rather that he should not have been demonized for any action he took. For example Romney told of how when he became govoner he thought that there weren’t enough women in his administration so he asked his staffers to prepare a “binder full of women” for him to go through to find more women to hire. This was bizarrely spun into saying he was somehow anti-women.
The point is Trump saw this and realized that instead of trying to play the game or trying to appease the offense industry was a no win scenario. So he went the other way and he won. Does anyone expect another reasonable candidate to run any time soon, on either side of the isle?
Leaving aside your thesis about Romney, it is laughable to suppose that 45 “realized” anything about how other candidates are treated and changed his approach accordingly. He is who he is and is unable to change even when it is in his own best interest.
The reaction to Romney was not from the candidates but from the voters. Romney was clearly an elitist who was completely out of touch with everyday people and their concerns (rather like Bush the Elder in 1992); also he was clearly a person who blew with the wind and whose positions could not be trusted. 45 is just a dead-common rich guy who spoke the language of the people, a language that Romney didn’t even know existed. They weren’t sure they could trust 45 to come through but the liked him, to them he was refreshingly real.
I don’t agree with the OP’s hypothesis… at least not in a partisan manner.
I saw this pattern in the 2008 election: the more popular candidate gets an easy ride from the media, and the less popular candidate gets savaged. When Clinton ran against Obama, anything she said about him blew up in her face, as he was more popular. When Obama won the primary and Sarah Palin was selected as vice president, comments he made against her blew up in his face since Palin was, for that brief moment, more popular than Obama.
The media wasn’t “fair” to Al Gore, who was less popular than Bush. (Gore won more votes, but that’s not what I mean when I say “popular”.)
There is a backlash against political correctness, but the last deliberately politically incorrect candidate who won an election in the US wasn’t just politically incorrect, but opened his campaign with racist comments, and hasn’t stopped making them now that he’s the president.
The guy who loses the election usually gets worse press coverage, and those two things happen for the same reason. The media was not exactly fawning over Walter Mondale.
Romney was not a total disaster as a candidate (the election was pretty close, you know) nor was he treated especially badly. He was a very dull candidate, and on the campaign trail lost any charisma he once might have had; his treatment by the media was quite similar to how Al Gore was treated, really, in that both men were so dull you pretty much had to latch on to a gaffe to have much to report (“ha ha Gore said he invented the Internet!”)
I think is primarily true. The media wants to be backing the winner. Left-wing Media Bias is a right wing cause so each example of it working against the Republican candidate will be seen by them as proof that the media discriminates against them. There is plenty of media though, and virtually all of it leans one way or the other, but they will still want to be known for predicting the winner, if not picking the winner, and they’re coverage will reflect during the election cycle.
Binders full of women was just funny, like I didn’t inhale. It wasn’t a dig at Romney.
I do believe that democrats acting like Romney was horrible was a boy who cried wolf scenario, so when Trump came people could say ‘yeah but you said that about Romney and Bush’ who had problems but not like Trump.
I agree with the OP, but in a broader sense. I don’t think it is all about Romney, but rather about Trump realizing that a) the press will always favor the Democrat candidate, and b) the public already mistrusts the press. So he came to his conclusion, c) run not just against the other candidates, but run against the press as well. Crazy like a fox.
Don’t forget Harry Reid’s outright blatant lies about Romney’s taxes, which he defended after the election with the smirk of “Romney didn’t win, did he?”.
That was a perfect set up for the 2016 campaign. Anything goes.
I think there were several factors that influenced Donald’s decision to run, but it’s not clear to me that he thought he could actually win. What is clear is that he thought he could get a shit load of attention and then claim “victory” in his own mind when it became clear that the gig was up. This is what he did when he was tweeting about Obama’s birth certificate. He knew that eventually it would be exposed as bullshit but that he would get a lot of attention from it because there are a hell of a lot of bigots out there that buy into conspiracy theories, especially those that have a racist angle. I’m not sure Donald ever thought he would, or even wanted to be president. But I think he did believe that he could be politically influential somehow long after the 2016 race was over, and probably a part of him wanted to be in some way.
I think the question on everyone’s mind is what convinced Donald Trump to run such a raw and divisive campaign when as recently as 2013, the consensus was that the country needed a candidate who could build coalitions that included a range of demographics. I suspect that Trump was already getting some evidence during his twitter attacks on Obama’s heritage that this was the sort of thing that could get attention. I’ve also thought about the George Zimmerman trial and other high profile cases of blacks getting killed by either white vigilantes or white officers. I don’t know whether this entered Trump’s realm of consciousness but the reaction along racial lines was striking, and it was different than what I would have expected. There was also of course congress’ inability to come to any sort of agreement on immigration reform, with different factions breaking out in the republican party. In some ways, all of these events portended things to come. Whether Trump though he could ride these issues to the presidency, I don’t know, but I think he certainly had good reason to believe that this would resonate with a large percentage of American voters.
The OP’s argument was addressed at length by some authors and outlets in last year’s election.
New York Times: “Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump” (if you can’t read the article - it might be lurking behind a paywall - the author points out that using hyperbole and exaggeration (i.e., “racist!” “socialist!”), the credibility of both the Republicans and Democrats has been shot to pieces. Now when or if a *genuine *racist or socialist comes along, crying “racist” or “socialist” won’t be very effective, if at all, because it was already used against non-racist or non-socialist candidates.)
This isn’t at all far-fetched, actually. If there were ever a time for a far-lefter to take the White House, it would be in 2020. There might never be such a staggeringly wide opportunity again for the far left.