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Yes, Romney would have lost after a two term Democratic president. Fundamentals were worse for Democrats in 2012 than the were in 2016. The national registrations imbalances were worse. The economy was quite a bit worse with very unpopular policies still in recent memory. I agree people vote for parties when they don't know the candidates, but far more people know the top of the ticket than the down ballot. We're talking about the top of the ticket here.
we had a 3 year long 24/7 news cycle into a hoax about Donald Trump's alleged collusion with Russia to win 2016; the media is regularly engaging in a cycle of throwing stuff out to see if it lands with a portion of the population who want it to be true and then they run with it
if the media crunchdown doesn't work then they rely on goldfish memory to drop it and move on to the next accusation cycle
if you're trying to hit every ball, your batting average may plummet, but eventually you find something which has a sufficient amount of nugget of truth or interest group to hang onto and then use it to gaslight large portions of the population
you shred your credibility when you do this and we've seen that in hyperdrive for 8 or 9 years, and yet the media has incredible power in framing any discussion, controlling any perception of reality and we see that in the way the regime tries so hard to control information and places of discussion, and set the outside limits of acceptable beliefs
you see it in the collusion hoax to the covid hysteria to the BLM religious revival
At this point, I think this Great Alternative Generic Republican theory is functionally unfalsifiable; fundamentals were worse, the GOP in 2016 had an even worse policy on immigration until Trump showed up, their trade/industrial policy was to ship it to china and suck more money into wall street, the possible alternative candidates polled worse in must win states in the midwest, and more, and yet this belief survives.
I'm not saying this particular to you, but it's always funny to watch the cycle in these sorts of forums: Trump is an idiot and buffoon, he will fail miserably, and never succeed at anything, but also once he does win or do anything (win presidency, get SCOTUS picks, overturn Roe, etc., etc.,) actually it wasn't that difficult and also any nonTrump generic GOP would have done it anyway (and probably would have been more successful!).
Trump isn't an idiot and a buffoon at all. He's a narcissistic media personality (but that describes most politicians in my direct experience), but he isn't dumb by any stretch of the imagination. But his impact has been about realigning the Republican party, rather than being good at winning elections.
Almost every politician is inter-changeable when it comes to elections in general, Trump is just the one a lot of people either think is awful or great and so tend to either go in hard on how great he is, or go in hard on how terrible he is. I don't think he is either particularly, he has positive traits and negative ones, and they almost balance out.
I'll put it this way, there is basically no-one the Democrats could have run who could have won this election, and basically no-one the Republicans could have run who would have lost it. That's why I predicted a Trump win, and ignored all the polls and media.
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