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Two possible candidates for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination -- Paul Ryan and Bobby Jindal -- have very different diagnoses for Mitt Romney's loss last week. As for solutions, both don't offer much detail. How Republicans explain their big losses on Election Day last week offers some clues to how the party will change before the next election. Some party leaders blame Republican voters and donors for being stuck in a rightwing media world, while some conservative bloggers blame GOP consultants for running too many moderates. Jindal and Ryan see it differently. Let's look at their ideas:
Paul Ryan
Problem: Ryan says the Republican Party did not get crushed last week because their proposals were unpopular. In his first post-election interview, with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Ryan responded to a question about whether voters had rejected the Republican vision by saying of President Obama, "Well, he got turnout. The president should get credit for achieving record-breaking turnout numbers from urban areas for the most part, and that did win the election for him."
Solution: Ryan does not say. The only options, if you're going to talk in those terms, would be getting more white people to vote or having fewer "urban" people vote. But Politico's James Hohmann points out that strategy may not work: Romney and Ryan "got wiped out in the overwhelmingly white state of New Hampshire, and they underperformed in non-urban sections of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa." On taxes, Ryan said he and House Republicans had already presented a plan, and called on Obama to offer his own.