National Constitution Center.org - Friday, November 30, 2012

There seems to be little doubt that Romney thought, like Thomas Dewey, that he would win the election.

He didn’t have a concession speech prepared.

Romney paid for an eight-minute fireworks display over Boston’s harbor. The permit for the fireworks expired at 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, November 7.

The Romney team also accidentally published a victory “transition” website.

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Romney internal polls mystery deepens after New Republic report

By Scott Bomboy



It may take election experts years to unravel the mystery of why Mitt Romney was convinced he had won the 2012 presidential election, as a new report shows some skewed internal poll numbers, and explains Romney’s two trips to Pennsylvania.

But at the same time, the article from The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber shows inconsistencies with reports from November 5 and November 6 about the numbers that might have convinced Romney and his team that he had a good chance of beating President Barack Obama in Ohio.

Obama’s resounding win is starting to take on more of a resemblance to Harry Truman’s “upset” in 1948, with Romney playing the role of Thomas Dewey.

Obama wound up with 332 electoral votes, taking every swing state except North Carolina. Somehow, the Romney campaign was seemingly convinced that he would win one of the final three swing states, or make a strong showing in Pennsylvania.

In the article, Scheiber goes over Romney’s internal polling numbers from six swing states with Neil Newhouse, the Republican pollster who did the surveys on the weekend before the election. Scheiber obtained the numbers from a source and Newhouse agreed to talk about the six states.

The conclusion is that Romney, based on his internal polls, thought he had at least 267 out of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the election, and the election would be decided in four states: Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada

The campaign was also convinced it had momentum in the overall election as voters headed to the polls.

The Romney campaign also believed Pennsylvania was a closer race that Wisconsin, which is why Romney appeared twice in the Keystone State just before the election.

There’s little discussion in The New Republic story about Nevada, so you can scratch Wisconsin and Nevada from the swing state list, which leaves Ohio and Pennsylvania as the states where the Romney campaign thought it could win the presidential election.

The New Republic provides Romney’s internal polling numbers for Pennsylvania, which showed Obama with a three-point lead.

So it seems like Ohio was the focal point of the campaign. The New Republic didn’t obtain detailed Ohio internal polling numbers, but it reported that Newhouse said that Romney trailed in their internal polling by just two points in Ohio on the weekend before the election.

There was a widely circulated report about the Ohio internal polling from the Daily Mail on November 5, Election Eve, that said Newhouse had Romney up by one point in Ohio and the Romney team thought the races in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were even.

The Romney team denied the Daily Mail report on November 6, which was Election Day.

But the Daily Mail report also had the Romney team forecasting a three-point lead in New Hampshire, which matches the number supplied to The New Republic.

The difference could be explained by the fact that the New Republic numbers are an average of the Saturday and Sunday polling numbers, and the Daily Mail numbers could be from just Sunday, which could have Romney gaining several points in each swing state.

Moving forward to Election Night, CNN reporter Peter Hamby dropped a bombshell in the early evening, revealing that Romney’s internal polling showed Obama with a five-point lead in Ohio on Sunday.

Then blogger Taegan Goddard published internal GOP exit polls that showed Romney trailing Obama by four points in Ohio and that Romney only had exit poll leads in two swing states.

In the end, Obama won Ohio by 1.9 percent, and we have three different Romney internal polling numbers for Ohio. The Daily Mail report had Romney up by one point; the New Republic report had Obama up by two points; and the CNN report had Obama up by five points.

The six internal polls published by The New Republic show a difference of between 3 and 7 percent from the actual election results, and all the polls overestimated Romney’s performance.

There seems to be less of a difference of opinion about why the polls underestimate the eventual outcome.

An analysis published by Slate on November 9 is similar to the analysis from The New Republic: the Romney team over-counted Republicans in their polling and underestimated Obama voter turnout.

“When anyone raised the idea that public polls were showing a close race, the campaign’s pollster said the poll modeling was flawed and everyone moved on. Internally, the campaign’s own polling—tweaked to represent their view of the electorate, with fewer Democrats—showed a steady uptick for Romney since the first debate. Even on the morning of the election, Romney’s senior advisers weren’t close to hedging. They said he was going to win ‘decisively,’” said Slate’s John Dickerson.

There also seems to be little doubt that Romney thought, like Thomas Dewey, that he would win the election.

He didn’t have a concession speech prepared, and Romney paid for an eight-minute fireworks display over Boston’s harbor.

The permit for the fireworks expired at 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, November 7.

The Romney team also accidentally published a victory “transition” website.

Scott Bomboy is the editor-in-chief of Constitution Daily.

The difference could be explained by the fact that the New Republic numbers are an average of the Saturday and Sunday polling numbers, and the Daily Mail numbers could be from just Sunday, which could have Romney gaining several points in each swing state.

Yep.
They looked at the polls and not the trend(s) as previously stated. Mac was a good week ahead of on that one.

And that is one of Nate Silver's "secrets" as well ~ trends and realistic assumptions ~

Sooz

I think Romneyites also just had such a strong sense of the rightness of their campaign. They believed their own propaganda. They felt such contempt for Obama that they couldn't imagine he actually had remained popular. And in the days after the election, as they were tring to sort it all out, a great many of them came up with this answer - "It's the voters, they are the problem. There is something wrong with these people."

Later they talked about demographic changes, about the effectiveness of Obama's voter database, etc. But underlying all of this analysis, I believe, is their bedrock conviction that there is just something wrong with the majority of American (US) voters. The Republican party, the conservatives, are just very disappointed in us.

they also believed their own internal polling, which was off by FIVE PERCENT.

there is one other thing that Romney and other conservatives messed up on. it is revealed in this comment:

"the campaign’s own polling—tweaked to represent their view of the electorate".

the meme went something like this: Ohio shows Democratic registration 6% higher than Republican. the 2010 election had Republicans up 1%. therefore, the 3% lead that Obama is showing is actually a 4% Romney lead". there were SEVERAL problems with this analysis.

first of all, it shows a really poor understanding of polling data. the party affiliation is IMBEDDED in the polls. in other words, the same people that are saying that they are likely to vote, and that they are voting for candidate X also have party affiliation and identity that is associated with that. in other words, there is no way to decouple the data from the party. the assumptions that conservatives WRONGLY made is that pollsters were "oversampling" based on 2008.

second of all, they assumed that the swing states would have lower voter turnout in 2012 than 2008. that turned out to be WRONG (turnout was actually slightly higher).

but finally, they were simply not convinced by INDEPENDENT pollsters, who stake their reputations on their polls. single campaign pollsters generally come and go, but if Gallup is off by 7% (they, in fact, WERE off by 7%), it reflects really badly on the organization.

i learned a bunch of stuff about polling during this cycle. the first is that national polls are not as good as state polls. the state pollsters know their demographics better. the second is that outliers are just that. practically every, if not all outliers were shown to be GROSSLY wrong in the final analysis. and finally, i learned that the internal chatter in a campaign tends to exaggerate the facts. it is better just to stay calm and watch the data. the data doesn't get excited. the data doesn't lie. the data just says what it is, and leaves you to decide whether you believe it.

IOW, wishful thinking is not a good reason when ordering a fireworks over Boston's harbor.

only if you are on the selling end.

Well, to be truthful I couldn't believe ANYONE would vote for Bush in 2004 so I can understand that sentiment. I was also very disappointed in us.

That said Romney was surrounded by like-minded people; Romneyites all. I think some of this is theatre, too. For all the jillions in his war chest, they did NOT play many ads in the Philadelphia market. With all of Pa's electoral votes, if Romney really thought it was in play he'd have pinged on it. He didn't.

In the 2004 cycle, I was ready to throw up with how many times Bush's Wolves campaign ad played. I just watched it again to link it and nausea stuck again.