Winston analysis: Montana, North Dakota big red flags for GOP

The Winston Group — the GOP polling outfit helmed by Boehner adviser David Winston — is out with a post-election assessment of why things went south for Republicans. It's worth your time to read it in full because it touches on more or less all of the various explanations out there for the GOP's bad year (demographics, campaign mechanics, etc.)

The big picture in the Winston analysis, though, is that Republicans from Mitt Romney on down failed to engage fully and win the national economic debate — with two Senate races in particular as warning signs for the party:

As a result, there was little clear rationale for a Romney presidency, other than that he would not be Obama. That was not enough to win, as the electorate was looking for solutions and an explanation of how each candidate would govern. But to simply blame Romney would not be correct. Many other Republican candidates also lost in races they were expected to win, and at the Senate level, some actually did worse than Romney. For example, in North Dakota, a Senate race that Republicans were expected to win, Berg trailed Romney by 9%. In Montana, another Senate race that Republicans should have won, Rehberg trailed Romney by 10%. In neither of these states did minorities play a significant role the way they did nationally, and younger voters decreased as a percentage of the electorate in Montana, going from 22% In 2008 to 15% in 2012. In exit polls in Montana, 1 out of 8 voters voted for Romney and Tester.

Those two Senate contests may be the 2012 results that most seriously challenge Republicans' confidence in their own messaging. It's hard to pin the Montana and North Dakota losses on demographics, on Romney's weakness as a candidate or on outside-the-mainstream Republican nominees. The GOP nominated establishment-backed members of Congress in heavily white states that Romney won easily. And Rick Berg and Denny Rehberg both lost.