Karl Rove is scrambling to protect his status in the GOP. Rove under fire

Karl Rove is feeling the heat.

The face of the historic $1 billion plan to unseat President Barack Obama and turn the Senate Republican, Rove now finds himself the leading scapegoat for its failure. And he’s scrambling to protect his status as a top GOP moneyman by convincing disappointed donors to his Crossroads groups that he did the best he could with their $300 million.


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Sources tell POLITICO that some donors have called Crossroads officials to ask how their polling could have been so far off, while others are openly grumbling that the groups should have spent more on the ground game. Rival operatives — long frustrated by Rove’s dominance of big GOP money — are seizing on the discontent, questioning whether he’s hurting the cause and privately urging donors to shut him out.

During a secret Thursday conference call with his benefactors, Rove laid out the analytics behind his assertions to donors that a massive late-game advertising push would expand the electoral map into Pennsylvania and deliver the White House and the Senate.

The call was civil, focusing on questions such as, “‘where was my strategy, was it right, was it wrong? What did we find out that we didn’t know before?’ That kind of thing — nothing negative, no recriminations or blame,” said Minnesota media mogul Stan Hubbard.

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Donors “weren’t saying anything like, ‘Hey, you dumb son of a b—,’” added Hubbard , who has donated to both the Rove-conceived American Crossroads super PAC and its secret-money nonprofit affiliate Crossroads GPS. “It was all very businesslike. It was as if you were in a business conference and you were a retailer and ‘why didn’t this product sell better?’”

On the call, some donors even told Rove, “’I’m glad I gave to you. I feel we made progress,’” recalled Hubbard. “Every quarterback, every coach doesn’t call every play 100 percent right,” he added. “I don’t know how you’re going to blame him. What are you going to blame Karl for?”

Others in conservative politics have been less forgiving.

Richard Viguerie, a pioneering direct-mail consultant, called for Republicans to purge from their ranks Rove and Ed Gillespie — who helped found Crossroads and later moved over to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign — as well as Romney advisers Stuart Stevens and Neil Newhouse. “In any logical universe,” he argued, “no one would give a dime to their ineffective super PACs, such as American Crossroads.”

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Rick Tyler, a former strategist for the pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC and a top adviser to Todd Akin’s Missouri Senate campaign, called Crossroads’ efforts “a colossal failure” and asserted, “Rove has too much control over the purse strings.”

Rove “has a lot of explaining to do, mostly to his donors. I don’t think donors are ever going to invest in that level again because it turns out that the architect didn’t know what he was talking about,” Tyler told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Rove didn’t comment for this story, but Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio attributed the mounting conservative grumbling to jealousy and said the political world hasn’t heard the last of Rove or Crossroads.

“A lot of folks with very old axes to grind have hidden behind blind quotes to take cheap shots against Karl in the last few days,” Collegio told POLITICO in an email laying out the main argument made by Rove and Crossroads: that things would have been a lot worse for Republicans without its ads.

“We’re dusting ourselves off, analyzing the data to figure out what went wrong and charting a path forward,” he added. “As we’ve always said, Crossroads is a permanent entity and will be back in 2014 and beyond — with Karl Rove continuing in his role as adviser, providing invaluable strategic vision and fundraising capability.”

Rove, meanwhile, has used his platforms in the conservative media to try to reshape the narrative over the GOP losses in most of the races in which Crossroads played a role, including an admittedly “awkward” election night incident on Fox News when the network for which he works as a political analyst — correctly — called Ohio for Obama.

In his Wall Street Journal column the next day, he blamed Obama’s win on an “anonymous New York Times headline writer,” a “hotel employee with a cell phone camera” who recorded damaging video of Romney criticizing American voters, and Hurricane Sandy, among other factors. And on Thursday, Rove told Fox News that Obama won by “suppressing the vote.”

Democrats, meanwhile, enjoyed seeing one of their most-feared antagonists on the hot seat. Obama adviser David Axelrod said donors should ask for their money back. “If I were one of those billionaires, … I’d be wanting to talk to someone and asking where my refund is, because they didn’t get much for their money,” Axelrod told reporters Thursday.

In fact, donors are starting to question the fundamental strategy of Crossroads and other groups that spent primarily on advertising, said Drew Ryun, who helped start or run two groups — the Madison Project and American Majority Action — that focused almost exclusively on ground organizing.

“In that reassessment, folks like Karl Rove and Carl Forti are going to take a beating,” Ryun said, referring to Crossroads’ political director Forti, a Rove protegé. “If Rove is not done, he is dangerously close to it.”

Asked about how the results reflect on Rove’s strategy, Wyoming megadonor Foster Friess, who says he donated to Crossroads GPS, said he is planning to shift his cash from television ads to grass-roots organizing. “I’m not a big fan of TV ads — they’re just too quick. They are sound bites.”

Rove still has plenty of defenders in the GOP establishment and its megadonor base.

“Anybody who says that Karl Rove is somehow diminished or marginalized is not thinking clearly. He is a well-regarded, well-respected organizer and analyst, and he will continue to be so,” former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty told POLITICO.

Frank VanderSloot, another Crossroads GPS donor, said “I felt like Karl Rove played it straight. He was with us. I thought he had good analytics. He’s never prophesied anything, he’d just say here’s what the numbers indicate, and he would say things that would help you understand a little bit more where things are.”

He called Rove “open, upfront. And he’s a hardworking son of a gun. I’m really impressed with his analytical skills and how he looks at things, and it had not occurred to me that he would come out diminished.”

Rove, who rose to national prominence as the architect of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns, has been counted out before, retreating from the political scene under the clouds of scandals related to the firing of U.S. attorneys and the leaking of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. But after a series of 2010 federal court decisions cleared the way for unlimited money in politics, he re-emerged at the helm of a network of outside groups that formed a sort of shadow Republican Party.

The current round of bashing carries serious risks for Rove because it threatens his greatest assets — his relationship with big donors and his reputation as a master of political data who is on the cutting edge when it comes to the most effective tactics.

Yet, of the $204 million in so-called independent expenditures reported by American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS and a related super PAC called Crossroads Generation, $190 million went toward television or radio ads backing Romney and GOP congressional candidates. Only $11 million went toward Web advertising, according to a POLITICO analysis of Federal Election Commission data.

Of the 31 races in which the groups aired ads, the Republican won only nine. And, since the groups spent $137 million on the presidential race, less than 5.7 percent of their total spending went toward helping winning candidates, according to a POLITICO analysis.

Rove’s prediction in the presidential race — first expounded in a data-dense Wall Street Journal column last month — was that Romney would win the popular vote by a margin of 51 percent to 48 percent, and would carry at least 279 Electoral College votes — “probably more.”

“It comes down to numbers,” he wrote. “And in the final days of this presidential race, from polling data to early voting, they favor Mitt Romney.”

An hour after most media outlets called the race for Obama, Rove was asked on Fox News about the impact of all the spending.

“We spent billions of dollars,” Fox host Chris Wallace said. “Crossroads, which you helped found, spent — what? — $325 million, and we’ve ended up with the same president, the same Democratic majority in the Senate and the same Republican majority in the House. Was it worth it?” Wallace wondered.

“Yeah,” responded Rove. “Look, if groups like Crossroads were not active, this race would have been over a long time ago.”