Wonkette:
Come, Drink In Delusional Mitt Romney’s Election-Night Sadness With Us: The lucky folks at CBS, America’s old-person network, got the scoop on the tragic emotional landscape of the Romney-Ryan campaign’s final night, when everyone’s sincere belief in their inevitable victory ran head-first into reality…. Here is the best part of the sad tale of Mitt Romney’s election night: Mitt Romney and his people were totally confident that they were going to win. Unless, of course, they are so determined to maintain a brave face at all times that they feel a need to anonymously leak to the press after the fact that they ran the campaign in a delusional bubble? That would be even weirder, so let’s just take this statement at face value:
Romney and his campaign had gone into the evening confident they had a good path to victory, for emotional and intellectual reasons. The huge and enthusiastic crowds in swing state after swing state in recent weeks — not only for Romney but also for Paul Ryan — bolstered what they believed intellectually: that Obama would not get the kind of turnout he had in 2008.
[…]
As a result, they believed the public/media polls were skewed--they thought those polls oversampled Democrats and didn’t reflect Republican enthusiasm. They based their own internal polls on turnout levels more favorable to Romney. That was a grave miscalculation, as they would see on election night.
Let that sink in for a minute: Team Romney was “unskewing” its internal polls… they didn’t like the reality they were getting from their own data collection and thus felt a need to fix it to conform to their inner emotional truth like some sort of woo-woo Californian New Ager.
By contrast, when after the first debate Obama’s people began getting numbers indicating that everyone thought he did a crappy job, the campaign flipped out and Obama agreed to make some changes he wasn’t keen on, because he wanted to win but recognized that he might lose.
So, here’s a hint, future presidential candidates of all stripes: you’re going to get at least 35 percent of the vote in every state…. No matter where you go, you will get large and enthusiastic crowds, unless your campaign is a complete disaster à la John McCain. Do not confuse the people who voluntarily show up for your rallies as being representative of the electorate!
Anyway, now that you understand the Romney campaign’s mindset, let’s jump ahead to election day!
Mitt Romney’s campaign got its first hint something was wrong on the afternoon of Election Day…. But it wasn’t until the polls closed that concern turned into alarm. They expected North Carolina to be called early. It wasn’t. They expected Pennsylvania to be up in the air all night; it went early for the President. After Ohio went for Mr. Obama, it was over, but senior advisers say no one could process it….
Romney was stoic as he talked to the president, an aide said, but his wife Ann cried. Running mate Paul Ryan seemed genuinely shocked, the adviser said. Ryan’s wife Janna also was shaken and cried softly.
Next came that concession speech…. Turns out Romney really did write it at the very last minute, because, as mentioned, he literally thought he was sure to win!…
And here's some of the raw meat:
Jan Crawford:
Adviser: Romney "shellshocked" by loss: After Ohio went for Mr. Obama, it was over, but senior advisers say no one could process it. "We went into the evening confident we had a good path to victory," said one senior adviser. "I don't think there was one person who saw this coming."
They just couldn't believe they had been so wrong. And maybe they weren't: There was Karl Rove on Fox saying Ohio wasn't settled, so campaign aides decided to wait. They didn't want to have to withdraw their concession, like Al Gore did in 2000, and they thought maybe the suburbs of Columbus and Cincinnati, which hadn't been reported, could make a difference. But then came Colorado for the president and Florida also was looking tougher than anyone had imagined. "We just felt, 'where's our path?'" said a senior adviser. "There wasn't one."…
"There's nothing worse than when you think you're going to win, and you don't," said another adviser. "It was like a sucker punch."… "He was shellshocked," one adviser said of Romney….
[T]hey believed the public/media polls were skewed…. Those assumptions drove their campaign strategy: their internal polling showed them leading in key states, so they decided to make a play for a broad victory: go to places like Pennsylvania while also playing it safe in the last two weeks. Those assessments were wrong…
Benjy Sarlin:
Karl Rove Tries To Convince Donors He’s Not The GOP’s Solyndra: Karl Rove boasted on the eve of Tuesday’s election that all signs pointed towards an electoral college landslide. He was right about the result, just wrong about the candidate. And now it’s up to Rove to explain to donors why, after blowing through $300 million of their money, President Obama is still President Obama and Harry Reid still runs the Senate. Judging by Rove’s election night tantrum on Fox News, this was not a situation he was well prepared for. In a surreal stretch of television, he refused to believe the network’s call of Ohio, lashed out at producers for making it, then spouted a blizzard of county by county statistics to justify his increasingly untenable case….
[Rove] offered up a litany of culprits in the Wall Street Journal op-ed on Thursday to blame for Obama’s win. People to blame included:
- Mother Nature: Don’t like the election result? Blame God: "Hurricane Sandy interrupted Mr. Romney’s momentum…" [But] Obama’s swing state lead had stabilized well before the storm hit.
- Editors: "Then there was the anonymous New York Times headline writer who affixed 'Let Detroit Go Bankrupt' to Mr. Romney’s November 2008 op-ed on reorganizing the auto companies….
- The Hired Help: "A hotel employee with a cellphone camera taped Mr. Romney talking at a May fundraiser about the '47%'….
- Dirty Tricks: Rove told Fox that Obama won by "suppressing the vote." Not by, say, imposing voting restrictions that disproportionately affect certain demographics, but by running mean ads about Bain Capital….
- Mitt Romney: Rove said the… failure to rebut the Bain attacks was exclusively a Romney issue. "We don’t do defense all that well"…
?Whether ultra-wealthy donors like Sheldon Adelson will decide Rove’s most recent writings are more credible than such recent gems as "Can We Believe the Presidential Polls?" is an open question.
Karl Rove:
Rove: Can We Believe the Presidential Polls?: An incumbent below 50% is in grave danger. On Election Day he'll usually receive less than his final poll number…. [S]tate-level polls… are endowed by the media with a scientific precision they simply don't have. Take last week's CBS/New York Times Florida survey…. The poll sampled more Democrats than Republicans—nine percentage points more…. Does it seem probable that Florida Democrats will turn out in higher numbers in 2012, especially when their registration edge over Republicans dropped by 22% in the past four years?… Team Obama's relentless efforts to denigrate Mr. Romney as a sure loser appear to have convinced the Republican candidate that he must run as the underdog. This will make the naturally cautious Mr. Romney more aggressive, energized and specific about his agenda in the campaign's closing weeks than he might have been. It will also make his victory more likely. America likes come-from-behind winners.
Prarie Weather:
Prairie Weather: Why the Republicans lost so badly: Because they developed a culture that was so scornful of Obama and well more than half of America, they simply couldn't imagine -- much less mobilize voters against -- his win. They swallowed their own propaganda and it poisoned their 2012 election hopes…. And they're planning, evidently, to go on kidding themselves.
Party officials said the review is aimed at studying their tactics and message, not at changing the philosophical underpinnings of the party.
Since those "philosophical underpinnings" are riddled with elitism and racism, I think we can count on their spending a good deal more time slushing around in their muddy sty before they're anything like respectable…
Peter Wallsten:
Republican Party begins election review to find out what went wrong: Party leaders said they already had planned to poll voters in battleground states starting Tuesday night in anticipation of a Mitt Romney victory--to immediately begin laying the groundwork for midterm congressional elections and a Romney 2016 reelection bid…. [P]arty leaders were confounded by the electorate that showed up on Tuesday…. Party officials said the review is aimed at studying their tactics and message, not at changing the philosophical underpinnings of the party.
"This is no different than a patient going to see a doctor," said Sean Spicer….
Many Hispanics were turned off by tough talk on immigration from Romney during the primary campaign, while Democrats think their candidates benefited from Republican policies on women’s health issues and verbal miscues on rape. Underscoring the thoroughness of the GOP defeat, a Florida exit poll showed that Cuban Americans went for Obama by 49 percent to 47 percent….
In an interview Thursday with ABC News’s Diane Sawyer, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said the immigration issue “has been around far too long.” He said a “comprehensive approach is long overdue, and I’m confident that the president, myself, others can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all.”… Boehner said: “What Republicans need to learn is: How do we speak to all Americans? You know, not just the people who look like us and act like us, but how do we speak to all Americans?”…
“We lost Wisconsin and Iowa, and we didn’t lose those because of the Hispanic vote,” Spicer said. “This is not a one-trick-pony problem.”…
