( CNN ) -- Republicans are consoling themselves with the claim that President Barack Obama did n't win a mandate Tuesday night , even if he did renew his White House lease for another four years . They are fooling themselves , however , if they think the 2012 election merely ratified the political status quo . More than just a personal victory for Obama , the outcome was an unmistakable defeat for GOP ideology . Disgruntled conservatives , of course , are already dressing Mitt Romney for the part of fall guy . But this is the politics of evasion . Sooner or later , GOP realists will have to reappraise the party 's message rather than shoot its messenger . That message was a call for rolling back government . Intoxicated by a potent brew of resurgent libertarian dogma and intense personal animus toward Obama , Republicans vowed to undo his major achievements : health care reform , new rules for financial markets , the regulation of carbon emissions , higher fuel economy standards for autos , and so on . Conservatives also railed against an alleged epidemic of dependency on government ; called for deep spending cuts ( but no tax hikes ) to reduce public deficits ; threatened to roll back women 's reproductive rights ; and took extreme positions on tax , immigration and energy issues that seemed calculated to thwart bipartisan compromise . Such tea party radicalism seemed to work in 2010 , amid acute public dissatisfaction with the slow pace of economic recovery . But a different electorate -- larger , more moderate and more Democratic -- rejected the conservative vision this time . In effect , the pragmatic center reasserted itself on Tuesday . According to exit polls , a plurality of voters , 41 % , were moderates , and they favored Obama by 15 points . In general , voters viewed Obama as more for the middle class and Republicans as tilting toward the interests of the rich . They did not accept Romney 's claims that Obama has been an incompetent economic manager ; nearly half the voters instead blamed the weak economy on his predecessor . Opinion : Obama 's critics , repudiated at last . And for all the GOP 's ceaseless demonization of Obamacare , the issue seemed to work in the president 's favor . Exit polls say health care registered as the voters ' second most important concern ( albeit a distant second to the economy and jobs ) . Obama won massively among these voters , which suggests that Republican promises to kill health care reform may have backfired by spurring greater intensity among its advocates . Some Republicans point hopefully to the fact that the election barely changed the existing composition of political forces in Washington . That 's true , but this was an election they could have won . With stubbornly high unemployment and the president 's low approval ratings ( often below the previously supposed `` ca n't win '' threshold of 50 % ) , the Republicans had objective reality on their side . Instead , they blew it by indulging in pathological partisanship and ideological hubris . The big question now is whether Republicans will accept the lessons of their defeat or take refuge in the usual alibis . The biggest lesson , of course , is they lost because they picked the wrong candidate -- a Massachusetts moderate who did n't given the country a clear choice between undiluted conservatism and Obama 's alleged ultra-liberalism . This electoral math is no better than Romney 's budget math . America may list slightly to the center-right , but no party can cede the center and win . What Republicans really need is an analogue to the New Democrat movement of the 1990s -- a determined effort by moderates and pragmatists to reassert control over their party 's agenda and electoral strategies . Whether they realize that is another matter : Democrats had to lose four out of five presidential elections between 1968 and 1992 before finally accepting that their message could no longer command electoral majorities . Opinion : Obama will get little time to celebrate . Republicans do n't have that luxury . Tuesday 's results made it blindingly obvious that the GOP 's political strategy of relying almost exclusively on white voters already has reached a dead end . As expected , white turnout was 72 % , according to exit polls , two points down from 2008 , and is projected to be two points lower in 2016 . The GOP 's bet on a kind of white identity politics -- which dates back to Ronald Reagan 's successful 1966 run for governor in California and was ruthlessly perfected by Richard Nixon in 1972 -- is played out . Meanwhile , what the National Journal 's Ronald Brownstein calls the Democrats ' `` coalition of the ascendant '' is growing by about the same amount every four years . This coalition includes minorities , young voters and women ( especially single women ) , along with highly educated white professionals . As they pore over election returns , expect GOP strategists to look especially ruefully at Latino voters . Obama won them by 71 % to 27 % , according to exit polls , improving on his 2008 performance . Assuming that Latinos would focus mainly on their economic struggles and ignore the GOP 's harshly anti-immigrant stance , proved to be a major miscalculation . A conservative governing philosophy centered on exploiting white voters ' sense of cultural dispossession is a formula for political marginalization , if not demographic suicide . Any honest post-mortem of the 2012 election should lead Republican strategists to this inescapable conclusion : It 's the ideology , stupid . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Will Marshall .
Washington 's re-election was an unmistakable defeat for GOP ideology , says Marshall . Tea party radicalism seemed to work in the 1990s , but not this time , he says . According to exit polls , a plurality of voters were moderates , says Will Marshall . The Latinos strategy of relying on white voters has reached a dead end , he says .