What more does a candidate need to do to lose a Presidential election?

[Marokai Backbeat]

I ask this question sincerely, because I'm baffled that Romney still has any chance at winning this election and I feel like I'll go crazy if I don't get this off my chest. This isn't even a political thing, it's all about how Romney's been running his campaign and the sheer amount of missteps his campaign has been making for the last three months.

Throughout the primary, Romney made a series of stupid remarks in the debates that displayed poorly on his character, but even setting aside the primary, his general election campaign has been a series of campaign "reboots" and stupid decisions. Spending very little time campaigning versus fundraising, his ground game (in terms of GOTV effort and field offices) are dwarfed by the Obama campaign. He has had perhaps more gaffes than any major American Presidential candidate in recent political history. His campaign has dodged specificity on virtually every single issue to the point that even Fox News has been calling him out on it. (This is especially mind blowing to me, Romney has absolutely no specific policies he's been running on whatsoever, aside from wanting to cut all tax rates by 20%, but there's no explanation of how it's paid for beyond telling everyone that it's paid for.)

His response to the embassy crises was self-evidently craven and opportunistic; but even setting aside all of that he had nothing of substance to contribute to the issue even if you agree with Romney politically. His choice of Ryan for a running made was utterly terrible politics, as it gives a ton of ammunition to Democrats on sensitive policy issues and Ryan has been completely muzzled while being just as vague about his policy goals as Romney and establishing himself as a serial liar. The Republican convention was a mismanaged and sad state of affairs that did basically nothing to improve the standing of Republican candidates and was immediately forgotten. Romney is one of the most negatively personally viewed Presidential candidates since polling began on the subject. And on top of all of that and more, Romney literally insulted half of the American population by calling them lazy freeloaders in a video that was not only insane to say when you're running for office, but also factually wrong.

This has nothing to do with my own personal views of Romney or the Republican Party more broadly. This isn't a political attack informed by my own ideological opposition to him. It doesn't even have to do with the fact that Romney has been running what is perhaps the most cynical campaign ever, just openly saying different things to different people in the hope that he can fool moderate voters watching more mainstream news outlets, preparing "zingers" for the debates because he seems to acknowledge even to himself that he couldn't win a debate on his own terms or on the basis of his policies and wants to trick the media by falling for it's tendency to obsessively play one-liners on a loop, or far more of his ads (such as the semi-racist "taking work out of welfare" commercial) haven't just been misleading, they've been completely fictitious and the reaction to that fact from the campaign was just "yeah, we basically don't care if what we say is true or not." This is about his campaign being filled with insane and insulting missteps that, were they all done by Obama, he'd been running in the low 40s in national polls right now.

I get that the economy isn't perfect and that it's not raining twenty-dollar bills and the rivers haven't turned into milk chocolate. I get that Obama is an incumbent President so there's naturally more settled opposition to him. I get that he's a black. But more and more I cannot understand why this man still remains competitive in most polls. A piece of cardboard with Romney's name on it would have as much or more policy specificity than Romney's entire campaign all without bluntly insulting half of the electorate.

So I ask this question and I ask it seriously: What more does a candidate have to do to lose an election? Short of looking straight into the camera at the debate tonight and saying "I hate all of you. Seriously, f**k off." I seriously cannot think of anything more that would ordinarily lose an election just on their own. It's as if the American public has become impervious to being negatively affected by Republican stupidity.