Election 2012 Results: Why Did Mitt Romney Lose the Election?

After a resounding defeat in the most expensive election of all time, Republicans should be asking themselves how Mitt Romney lost.

President Obama is saddled with high unemployment, mediocre favorability ratings and a gradual financial recovery, so how could Republicans lose, and by so much?

Romney was never their favorite candidate. He was the expedient candidate, the one everyone could (eventually) agree on. But Romney was never able to decide exactly what kind of candidate he was going to be.

Romney had the unenviable task of uniting a fractured Republican party-from Tea Party converts to fiscal conservatives, from neo-conservative military cheerleaders to single-issue anti-abortion protesters, from evangelical creationists to his own Mormon church.

And instead of providing a single banner under which they all must flock or be left out in the cold, he tried to appease everyone, one at a time, in full view of everyone else.

The Romney that veered hard to the right during the Republican primaries looked nothing like the Romney that debated the president in early October.

And those were actually the high points of Romney's campaign. But he refused to be nailed down on any kind of specifics, and his evasiveness and defensiveness only served to amplify the image of Romney as aloof and unrelatable.

Of course, Romney isn't entirely at fault. The entire Republican party needs to be retooled from the ground up. Most Republicans care about one of the big issues the party stands for, and puts up with all the others.

And Republicans made a conscious effort to fall back on their base in this election, trying to win enough of the white vote to counter any lead Obama may have had among minorities, women and young people.

Obviously, it didn't work.

The electorate is only getting less white, and traditional Democratic demographics are increasing their share of the population.

Whoever the Republicans run in 2016 won't be able to win on white men alone, and the party needs a new strategy quickly.