Despite a terrible showing on Election Day, Karl Rove believes that American Crossroads and its more secretive issue-advocacy arm, Crossroads GPS — which allows donors to remain anonymous — are here to stay, the Washington Post reports.

“Rove is pondering new missions for Crossroads to address weaknesses laid bare by the GOP’s back-to-back failures to win the White House and the fact that the party fell short when expected to win back the Senate.”

“Where until now it battled only in general elections and against Democrats, Crossroads is considering whether to start picking sides in Republican primaries. The idea would be to boost the candidate it deems most electable and avoid nominating the kind of flawed and extreme ones who cost the party what should otherwise have been easy Senate wins in Florida, Missouri and Indiana.”

Sasha Issenberg: “It is no coincidence that in both 2004 and 2012 the engines of radical innovation were the campaigns of incumbent presidents. We tend to underappreciate how radically different a presidential re-election is from any other enterprise in American political life. It is the rare chance for candidates to disrupt the cycle of short-term, election-year priorities and invest in their own research agendas instead of being forced to follow a consultant-driven marketplace.”

White House officials suggest Jon Huntsman (R), the former Utah governor, Obama’s ambassador to China and Republican presidential candidate, might be a candidate for Secretary of State, the AP reports.

“Huntsman is still widely respected by the administration even if he’d hoped to unseat Obama. Choosing Huntsman would allow the president to claim bipartisanship while putting an Asia expert in the job at a time when the U.S. is focusing more attention on the world’s most populous continent.”

KSL-TV: “The speculation caught many political observers off guard. Some told us
that taking another job in the Obama administration might make it hard,
if not impossible, for him to run as a Republican again for the White
House.”

Rep. Allen West (R-FL) refused to concede after the state concluded that challenger Patrick Murphy (D) held a lead beyond the margin needed for an automatic recount, the AP reports.

West was elected in 2010 on a wave of tea party support and has since had a constant string of headline-grabbing statements, from calling congressional Democrats communists to saying President Obama, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and others should “get the hell out of the United States.”

Paul Begala: “Our goal was to take Romney’s greatest strength–his business record–and make it a weakness. We were given a road map by none other than the late, great Ted Kennedy. As the 2008 election was approaching, I paid the senator a visit. I thought Romney might be the GOP nominee, and Kennedy gave me a tutorial on how to beat him. Don’t underestimate Romney, Kennedy said. He’s smart and resourceful and will say anything, take any position. Kennedy recounted how his campaign team tracked down employees of companies that had been shut down after being bought by Bain Capital. Shamelessly copying Kennedy’s plan, we interviewed dozens of laid-off ­middle-class working people. Their stories were emblematic of the collapse of the middle class: factories closed, health benefits canceled, lives ruined.”

“My old friend, former Georgia governor and senator Zell Miller, taught me that ‘a hit dog barks,’ but Romney remained silent. I am still amazed that Romney did not respond. He allowed our little, underfunded super PAC to define him as Gordon Gekko. Without his business record, Romney was left with nothing but his charm.”

Soon after Mitt Romney conceded the presidential election, more than
55,025 Facebook users have “unliked” Romney, at a rate of about
847 an hour, according to Mashable. 

President Obama has been declared the winner of Florida in the presidential election, the Associated Press reports.

The final Electoral College tally is Obama 332, Romney 206.

The latest nationwide popular vote tally is Obama 50.6%, Romney 47.9%.

The Week lists seven things he should have done differently.

The Economist: “Arguing whether Mr Obama has a mandate is like debating whether somebody has mojo, or whether basketball star LeBron James is ‘in the zone’ on a given night: there’s a discussion to be had, but no way to come to a definite conclusion.”

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

“During a secret Thursday afternoon 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.”

National Memo: Karl Rove gets philosophical.

“What’s been interesting to watch is that our data has been remarkably
consistent really from last spring forward, and our battleground polls
really didn’t fluctuate much. There were times when it would dip to
where we had a 2-point lead in the battleground states. There’s one poll
over the course that we had a 1-point lead.  By and large, we’ve been 3
and 4 points ahead in the battleground polls.”

— David Axelrod, in an interview with Mike Allen, giving a postmortem on the 2012 presidential campaign.

Even though Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) won re-election at the same time he was on the national ticket, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel notes he was crushed in his hometown of Janesville, WI by challenger Rob Zerban (D), 55% to 44%. Ryan had never lost Janesville in a re-election campaign before.

In addition, the Obama-Biden ticket defeated Romney-Ryan ticket in Janesville by a whopping 25 points, 62% to 37%.

“The drop-off from the Ryan congressional vote to the Romney-Ryan presidential vote was much larger in Janesville (7.2 points) than it was in the rest of the congressional district (3 points). Put another way, there were more Ryan ticket-splitters in Janesville than other places: people who voted for Ryan for Congress but against Ryan for vice president.”

Fox News: What’s next for Paul Ryan?