Weigel

Opening Act: Ramesh

Ramesh Ponnuru writes the election postmortem that conservatives need to read. (Not they listen to me.)

The absence of a middle-class message was the biggest failure of the Romney campaign, and it was not its failure alone. Down-ticket Republican candidates weren’t offering anything more — not the established Republicans, not the tea-partiers, not the social conservatives. Conservative activists weren’t demanding that Romney or any of these other Republicans do anything more. Some of them were complaining that Romney wasn’t “taking the fight to Obama”; few of them were urging him to outline a health-care plan that would reassure voters that replacing Obamacare wouldn’t mean taking health insurance away from millions of people.

Robert McCartney reports out a voting problem that, because of the results, didn’t get much attention: The lines in Fairfax, Virginia.

By the week before the election, Quinn’s office had not acted on Democratic nominations of about 250 elections officials, Farrell said. The office cited a lack of paperwork or other shortcomings that Farrell said had not caused such delays in previous elections.

Moreover, at the same time, 140 Democratic-nominated officials had been approved by Quinn’s office and were ready to get the okay from the Electoral Board. But the two GOP-appointed members of the three-member board chose not to hold a meeting as scheduled on the Friday before the election. They did so over Stark’s objections.

And, of course, Florida still has no idea how to do this.