The head of the nation's leading solar trade group this afternoon celebrated what he called a "fatal miscalculation" by GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and Republican super PACs to make the collapse of the Solyndra solar energy company a major issue in the 2012 campaign.

The 2011 bankruptcy of the company that received more than half a billion in stimulus dollars through a Department of Energy loan guarantee program quickly became a rallying cry for the GOP to attack the Obama administration.

But Republicans also couldn't let go of Solyndra, even when the issue snowballed into a larger -- and less politically winnable -- fight over clean energy, Solar Energy Industries Association President and CEO Rhone Resch told a meeting of regional members in Washington, D.C.

"They just couldn't resist. It was too tempting, and unfortunately it played in the election very much in a negative way for them," Resch said.

Data collected by SEIA indicated that Romney and Republican super PACs saw opportunity in jumping on the outrage provoked by Solyndra's implosion in the late summer of 2011.

By April, Resch said, 81 percent of all the negative ads that had been run against the Obama campaign by Romney and GOP super PACs were focused in one way or another on clean energy.

But the battle over Solyndra turned into a war against clean energy.

To make his point, Resch held up a sign he picked up in Ohio during the final week of the 2012 campaign. The sign, which the conservative super PAC FreedomWorks produced for the Ohio Senate contest between Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) and state Treasurer Josh Mandel, read "Brown = War on Coal."

"I was amazed by how much coal became the symbol of the Republican Party in some of these key swing states," Resch said.

Meanwhile, exit polling in those states showed a deep support for clean energy.

"They were focusing this election to support coal, yet when you step back and look at the number of people who are employed by the solar industry in Ohio, it is nearly three times as many that are employed by the coal industry," he said.

Cai Steger, an energy policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council who was on the same panel this afternoon, agreed with Resch's assessment.

"There was a number of folks who thought they could move votes with these attacks," Steger said. "This just didn't happen."

Candidates who embraced clean energy did well, he said, and voters who were going to be moved by Solyndra "were already moved by Solyndra when they first saw it on Fox News. They weren't necessarily going to be moved by another $50 million of ads that went after Solyndra."

But Resch said that with the massive amount of money poured into this election cycle, being on the right side of the issue wasn't enough.

He praised SEIA's "aggressive" crisis-communication plan put in place after Solyndra's collapse for creating a firewall between the now-infamous company and the rest of the industry. And he said other renewable energy groups such as the American Wind Energy Association joined in the effort to correct misinformation and prevent other clean energy technologies from becoming a political football.

Resch said SEIA targeted six states in its 2012 presidential campaign efforts: Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Obama lost Arizona and won the other five states.

"We were 5 for 6," he said.