Election's No. 2 loser was Karl Rove, and Democrats are openly gleeful (+video)
(Read article summary)For all the criticism being heaped on Mitt Romney, GOP strategist Karl Rove is getting nearly as much. Will Rove's reputation as 'mastermind' strategist be permanently damaged?
If Mitt Romney was the primary loser on Election Night, then the No. 2 loser, by universal consensus, appears to have been Karl Rove. And Democrats couldn’t be happier about it.
Mr. Rove, of course, ran two of the biggest outside-donor groups this cycle, Crossroads GPS and American Crossroads, whose primary tasks were to help defeat President Obama and take back the Senate for Republicans. He raised hundreds of millions from wealthy Republican donors – and in the end, those donors got very little for their money.
Republicans not only failed to take the White House, but only two of the Senate candidates backed by Rove’s groups won. As a report for the Sunlight Foundation estimated, American Crossroads got a 1.29 percent return on its spending. Crossroads GPS fared slightly better, with a 14.4 percent return.
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Rove also publicly predicted that Mr. Romney would win with 285 electoral votes (he wrongly assumed Romney would take Ohio, Iowa, Virginia, Colorado, and Florida). And he was the center of a bizarre episode on Election Night when, live on Fox News, he accused the network of prematurely calling Ohio for Romney (he was wrong there, too).
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