The chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, Corey Stewart (R), is running for Virginia Lieutenant Governor in 2013. But the former co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s 2012 Virginia campaign effort will have to contend with his one of the same challenges in a state Romney lost with just 47 percent of the vote: Cayman Islands investments.

A ThinkProgress review of Stewart’s 2012 financial disclosures reveals that one of his largest personal holdings — between $10,001 and $50,000 as of January 2012 — is in the DWS Enhanced Commodity Strategy mutual fund. The fund, managed by Deutsche Bank’s DWS Investments, lists its largest investment as “DWS CAYMAN COMMODITY II LTD.”

According to fund documents, that means the fund is heavily invested in a DWS Cayman Island subsidiary. The Cayman Islands, a well-known tax haven, was famously a well-known home for Romney’s off-shored money.

While the tax advantages of investing the Caymans may not accrue to Stewart and other shareholders directly, they can provide a great benefit to the investment managers at the expense of the U.S. Treasury. Stewart is well-familiar with these rules, as a well-paid international trade lawyer for both U.S. and international corporations.

Stewart, like Romney, has been a strong advocate of the idea tax cuts magically lead to balanced budgets. Like Romney, he advocates deregulating business, wants to pursue anti-LGBT and anti-women social policies, and believes Arizona’s anti-immigrant laws are the ideal model.

Former Mitt Romney adviser Dan Senor conceded that in the aftermath of President Obama’s re-election, Republicans can’t start every economic debate insisting on lower tax rates and must do a “better job of thinking through how to talk about middle class economics.”

“We have to spend meaningful time over the next several years developing a policy agenda that reflects our principles but is modernized,” he said during an appearance Wednesday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “Unless we address the core issue of middle class economics with innovative ideas,” Republicans will continue to struggle in future elections. Watch it:

Senor also agreed that Republicans must tackle immigration reform, arguing that the party “has been suffering on the issue of immigration for years.” “I think the problem transcends Mitt Romney. I don’t think his position helped the Republcian problem, but I think it predates him.”

Since the election, several prominent Republicans have called on the GOP to lead on the issue, though they remain split on whether to tackle the problem in a single comprehensive reform or piecemeal.

Election exit polls also showed that voters rejected the GOP’s main economic argument — their insistance that the nation should not raise taxes on the richest Americans. “Almost half of voters said taxes should be boosted on Americans making more than $250,000 per year, and one in seven voters said taxes should be increased on all Americans.”

Mitt Romney’s comments to donors about the “gifts” that President Barack Obama gave to constituents to win the election continue to cause members of his party to run away from the former candidate. Despite their insistence during the election that Romney’s position on entitlement in America was accurate, the new consensus among the GOP politicians, if not their pundits, is that Romney’s statements could not be more wrong.

After several prominent Republican governors expressed their disagreement with Romney’s statements, the hits have continued coming. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, considered at one point by the Romney campaign as a possible running mate, said on Friday, “You can’t expect to be a leader of all the people and be divisive. You have to talk about themes, policies that unite people, and play to their aspirations and their goals and their hopes for their family and their neighbors.”

Tim Pawlenty, former Minnesota governor and another potential running mate for Romney, though silent on Romney’s 47% comments, likewise shot-down Romney’s “gifts” theory.

Those who didn’t outright disagree with Romney’s words disagreed with his message. Appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) stated that it wasn’t his intention to vilify those who are beneficiaries of public assistance programs:

People can be on public assistance and scheme the system and that’s real, these systems are teetering on bankruptcy. But most people on public assistance don’t have a character flaw. They just have a tough life. I want to create more jobs. The focus should be on creating more jobs, not demonize those who find themselves on hard times.

Meanwhile, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) gave an interview highlighting his issues with Romney’s belief. “I don’t want to rebut him point by point. I would just say to you, I don’t believe that we have millions and millions of people in this country that don’t want to work,” Rubio said. “I think we have millions of people in this country that are out of work and are dependent on the government because they can’t find a job.”

New Mexico governor Susana Martinez (R) and top Romney surrogate to the Hispanic community Carlos Guiterrez have also joined in the chorus disparaging Romney’s statements and calling for more inclusiveness in the Republican party. It’s unfortunate that this many Republican politicians seem to have discovered the divisiveness of their party’s policies towards minorities and the working class only after a massive loss to President Obama.

We’re now well into the political aftermath of the 2012 election, and the pattern of destruction is telling. In demographic after demographic, Obama defeated Romney by remarkable margins: 55 percent among women, 60 percent among voters under 30, 71 percent among Hispanic voters, and a stratospheric 93 percent among African-Americans. Rather than a fluke, the Obama coalition of 2008 looks like it’s here to stay, and the recriminations and soul-searching amongst conservatives and Republicans are in full swing.

The sudden post-election shift of major politicians and media figures on immigration reform betrayed a fear that their party’s hard-line stance wrecked its chances with Hispanics. A chorus of conservative bloggers, Republican strategists, and even what’s left of the party’s moderate politicians have laid blame on its nurturance of white nativism, its tone-deafness on women’s reproductive challenges, or the absolutism of its anti-abortion rhetoric.

There’s certainly some truth to these takes. But this notion that scattershot appeasement of various voting blocks is the path back for Republicans makes a fundamental error. It buys into conservatives’ silly caricature of Democrats as a party without a vision — “an incoherent amalgam of interest groups, most of which are vying for benefits for themselves and their members at the expense of other Americans,” as Yuval Levin bitterly put it.

There is, in fact, a fundamental vision that unites virtually all the disparate groups in Obama’s coalition. It’s sitting right there in the exit polling and the narrative of the campaign, for anyone willing to see it. Crudely put, it’s the economic issues: on the practical level, the recognition that the free market, whatever its virtues, does not deal justly with people when left to its own devices. And on the moral level, the simple, elegant, age-old conviction that we are all our brother’s keeper. And it’s the GOP’s rejection of these propositions that set it on the path to electoral defeat.
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Republican governors Bobby Jindal (LA) and Scott Walker (WI) spoke out against Mitt Romney’s claim that Obama won because he gave minorities and young people “big gifts” in the form of Obamacare, his DREAM directive, and partial college loan forgiveness. At the Republican Governors Association meeting in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Jindal called the statement “absolutely wrong,” saying, “I absolutely reject that notion.” Walker, who was on a panel with Jindal when he denounced Romney, agreed that the GOP isn’t “just for people who are currently not dependent on the government. It’s for all Americans.”

Both governors, who were Romney surrogates, stayed quiet during Romney’s earlier iteration of this idea, when he told donors that 47 percent of Americans “believe they are victims” and will never “take personal responsibility.” Walker ducked the controversy at the time, saying “That’s a statement he has to take on, not myself.” Jindal also deferred judgment, refusing to “be one of these political pundits.”

But after a definitive loss down the ticket on Election Night, Republicans are doing some “brutally honest” soul-searching about the future of their party. Jindal was especially outspoken, imploring the GOP to “stop being the stupid party.” He was blunt in his newfound criticism for Romney in an interview with Politico:

The Republican Party is going to fight for every single vote. That means the 47 percent and the 53 percent…We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything. We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys.

Other top Republicans lavished blame on Romney at the conference and complained that the campaign did not offer enough specifics to combat Obama.

Romney told donors in a call on Wednesday that Obama won because he “focused on giving targeted groups a big gift,” before going on to explain how several of the presidents’ policies have directly helped these Americans.

Mitt Romney is attributing his loss in the 2012 election to the “gifts” President Obama gave to minority voters, the Los Angeles Times is reporting. Speaking to donors on Wednesday, the former Massachusetts governor praised his own campaign, but speculated that Obama won because he was “very generous” to his base:

Mitt Romney told his top donors Wednesday that his loss toPresident Obama was a disappointing result that neither he or his top aides had expected, but said he believed his team ran a “superb” campaign with “no drama,” and attributed his rival’s victory to “the gifts” the administration had given to blacks, Hispanics and young voters during Obama’s first term.

Obama, Romney argued, had been “very generous” to blacks, Hispanics and young voters. He cited as motivating factors to young voters the administration’s plan for partial forgiveness of college loan interest and the extension of health coverage for students on their parents’ insurance plans well into their 20s. Free contraception coverage under Obama’s healthcare plan, he added, gave an extra incentive to college-aged women to back the president. [...]

“The President’s campaign,” he said, “focused on giving targeted groups a big gift—so he made a big effort on small things. Those small things, by the way, add up to trillions of dollars.”

The comments echo the claims Romney made during a private high-dollar fundraiser earlier this year. In the video first published by Mother Jones, Romney argued that 47 percent of Americans are “dependent upon government.”

In his first interview since losing the election, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) also wouldn’t admit that voters rejected the ticket’s economic vision and instead chalked up Obama’s victory to a large turnout of the “urban vote.”

Romney and Ryan however, also lost states with very low minority populations, including New Hampshire, Iowa, Maine and Vermont.