Romney honestly thought he would win.

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Luke Skywalker
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Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by Luke Skywalker »

I never understood this.

Despite trailing in every reliable poll and a huge swath of polling projections, Mitt Romney was so confident that he would be reelected:

1. He only prepared a victory speech.

2. He prepared a victory website.

3. He planned victory fireworks.

4. His advisers honestly couldn't believe that he could have lost the election.

5. And he refused to concede the election for an hour after CNN, MSNBC and even Fox News called the race for Obama.

(to say nothing of conservative forums and blogs that were dead convinced that they would be gloating and celebrating come November 7th)

Now; are Romney and his advisers sore losers who still feel the need to maintain a facade of confidence, or is the Republican party literally self deluded? We're talking about an entire political party that runs by a different set of math and statistics than the rest of the fucking planet. It's disturbing; I know we joke about Republicans deluding themselves into supporting ridiculous positions, but I never thought they were literally this fucked up.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by CaptJodan »

This was one of the biggest takeaways for me during this election. Both election night and afterward, I was continually surprised that there was this genuine sense by conservatives that they would win. I had assumed most of the time that it was bluster, or just trying to sell the brand as unbeatable to the masses, while secretly knowing that they might well lose. I was very surprised when not only were places like Fox News genuinely surprised, but Romney himself was caught flat footed without a concession speech (that fact alone convinced me that he was not fit to be president. You try and prepare for every possible outcome. And in an election, you take nothing to chance).

The recurring theme I keep hearing around the web is that they actually trapped themselves in "the bubble" that Bill Maher always talks about. They DID end up making their own facts, relying on data that was 8 years old (last night's Daily Show showed one of their guests talking about how he relied on how things were in 2004, thinking votes would go back to that level in this election), and generally spinning the numbers so that it conformed with their viewpoint. And when they then turn around and demonize the "liberal bias" of the "lamestream media", they ignore the actual facts coming out. They would never have trusted 538.com because of it's attachment to the New York Times, even though it predicted things so well in 2008. They simply relied on their version of polls, which gave them the answers they needed.

In a way, they were traitors to their own cause. Had they relied on accurate data, they might have tried to rally their base more, maybe getting more people to the polls (though it might not have helped in the end). Instead, the people tuning into Fox exclusively probably felt that this was a shoe-in election.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by Grumman »

CaptJodan wrote:that fact alone convinced me that he was not fit to be president. You try and prepare for every possible outcome.
I don't agree with you. He should prepare for every possible outcome where his preparations actually matter, but what that guy who just lost does doesn't matter.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by spaceviking »

It matters if Romney wants to continue to portray himself as a statesman.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by General Zod »

There's nothing really unusual about this. If you're running for any kind of political office and you don't act like you're going to win then why should the rest of the people vote for you?
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by Dalton »

General Zod wrote:There's nothing really unusual about this. If you're running for any kind of political office and you don't act like you're going to win then why should the rest of the people vote for you?
Externally, yeah. Internally, they should have been prepared but they didn't seem to be.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by CJvR »

Luke Skywalker wrote:5. And he refused to concede the election for an hour after CNN, MSNBC and even Fox News called the race for Obama.
Well better to wait than concede to quickly, particularly considering how close some of the races were. Ohio swung back to a Romney lead for a while about an hour after it had been called for Obama and the newsies never seemed to notice as they were in the middle of the Obama victory analysis.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by mr friendly guy »

Nate Silverman gave pretty accurate prediction of what actually happened. The right went apeshit on him. I think its more than just needing to put on a brave face. How Australian politicians do it is putting on a brave face. The right in America just went into reality denying mode. Witness Karl Rove asking Fox new's own counters to count again when they called it for Obama.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by Dalton »

CJvR wrote:
Luke Skywalker wrote:5. And he refused to concede the election for an hour after CNN, MSNBC and even Fox News called the race for Obama.
Well better to wait than concede to quickly, particularly considering how close some of the races were. Ohio swung back to a Romney lead for a while about an hour after it had been called for Obama and the newsies never seemed to notice as they were in the middle of the Obama victory analysis.
That's because the remaining votes were from heavily Democrat counties.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by Blayne »

You always prepare a concession speech or risk angering the wrath from high atop the thing.

I'm also surprised that even Republican insiders/elders seem to have been caught flat footed within the echo chamber here.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by Simon_Jester »

If you really know what you're doing, you prepare a speech in case things go wrong.

Nixon had a speech ready for the failure of Apollo 11. Eisenhower had a speech in case the Normandy landings failed. And so on.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by Dalton »

Almost a cultish mentality it seems.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by Mr Bean »

Dalton wrote:Almost a cultish mentality it seems.
Nope just selective media, easy to understand.

Quick Dalton, you get a confusing text message about something big has happened where do you turn?

If your over forty, white and religious the answer is "Fox News", if you watch news it's Fox News. If your read websites it's a select few all of which reinforce the Fox News narrative. There is no equivalent of the broad based collective news dumper like the Huffingpost on the right. The closest that we have is Drudge but Drudge gives prominence to reinforcing the narrative not to pimping what's popular.

These right wing websites and Fox are not trying to find what's popular or interesting and report on it. Rather they take narrative and try to make them popular and interesting. If you limit your viewing and reading habits enough then yes you can get 24 hours a day telling you that your victory is assured.

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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by Eframepilot »

News stories confirmed that Romney's internal pollsters really were deluded. They thought the demographic makeup would be like 2004 and 2010 and that 2008 was just a fluke. Just like Gallup, who wound up with the worst polling of the cycle.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by Channel72 »

Mr Bean wrote:These right wing websites and Fox are not trying to find what's popular or interesting and report on it. Rather they take narrative and try to make them popular and interesting. If you limit your viewing and reading habits enough then yes you can get 24 hours a day telling you that your victory is assured.
Yeah - it's pretty funny actually. The day of the election, the top headline on foxnews.com was something about GOP voters being harassed in Philadelphia or something. No other major news outlet even mentioned it. Fox News's MO is often to seek out mostly insignificant, often highly-localized stories which cast Democrats/liberals in a bad light, and blow them out of proportion into headline news. Then, when no other news outlet picks up the story (because nobody really cares), Fox pundits complain that only Fox News had the integrity to cover the story because the rest of the media is biased towards liberals.

This strategy basically makes up the entire "War on Christmas" narrative Fox is always trying to sell around the holidays. (Oh no! Some school principal in Fucktown, Wisconsin said kids can't come to school with religious-themed shirts, so therefore there's a nation-wide, liberal oppression-machine that will destroy Christianity if we don't stop it!)
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by lPeregrine »

Is there actually any evidence that Romney didn't ever prepare a concession speech, instead of that "I only wrote a victory speech" being just another meaningless statement of confidence? Even if he'd spent the past week planning his concession speech and knew defeat was almost inevitable he'd still make confident statements right up until the end, just like any politician, and his statement becomes just another empty "of course we're going to win".

As for the rest of it, is it really a surprise? Who cares if you only have a 10% chance of winning, the cost of preparing a victory celebration is pretty trivial compared to the obscene amounts of money you've already spent on the campaign and you're going to look pretty stupid if the unlikely happens and you win but don't have anything prepared for it.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by wautd »

Luke Skywalker wrote:is the Republican party literally self deluded?
I guess that if you repeat a lie enough, you start believing it. Even the assholes from Fox News
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by Dark Hellion »

I think that many groups where reliant on very outdated polling methods that provided poor polling information, regardless of political affiliation. When combined with the echo chamber of the right, outdated political strategy and the generic desire to win its no surprise that Romney thought he could win.

I think that the biggest challenge of the right currently is whether they can actually adapt to the changing demographics of modern America or whether they will continue to rely on obsolete strategy and be marginalized. I'd like to think that the Republicans have the political wherewithal to update themselves since I think without real competition the Democrats will stagnate themselves into repeated Obama-esque presidents as opposed to actual candidates interested in fixing problems.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by LaCroix »

I honestly doubt that the Democrats will ever be able to "wither away".

The GOP could nominate a honest to god strawman with a badly hidden puppeteer having his arm in his ass so the mouth moves, and still, 40-45% would vote for him. Democrat voters are much less "religious" in their voting attendance. So the Democrats actually need to whip their base into a frenzy and mobilize everyone they have, while the GOP does sit on a mound of secure votes, that only need a couple of lines on FOX to activate.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by Broken »

I'm about to head out the door to go to work so I don't have time to track it down, but the New York Times had an article in the editorial section a day or two ago about this. IIRC, it basically said that the Romney campaign had a computer program called Orca that was predicting a Romney win right up until the tv called it for Obama. Garbage in, Garbage out; they really did think they were winning on some level.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by Ritterin Sophia »

The Republican Party is stuck believing that everyone else is making up the numbers like they do, it did not occur to them them that perhaps Fox News and the Republican pollers were the ones being dishonest.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by Lost Soal »

lPeregrine wrote:Is there actually any evidence that Romney didn't ever prepare a concession speech, instead of that "I only wrote a victory speech" being just another meaningless statement of confidence? Even if he'd spent the past week planning his concession speech and knew defeat was almost inevitable he'd still make confident statements right up until the end, just like any politician, and his statement becomes just another empty "of course we're going to win".

As for the rest of it, is it really a surprise? Who cares if you only have a 10% chance of winning, the cost of preparing a victory celebration is pretty trivial compared to the obscene amounts of money you've already spent on the campaign and you're going to look pretty stupid if the unlikely happens and you win but don't have anything prepared for it.
Theres this:
Adviser: Romney "shellshocked" by loss
Mitt Romney's campaign got its first hint something was wrong on the afternoon of Election Day, when state campaign workers on the ground began reporting huge turnout in areas favorable to President Obama: northeastern Ohio, northern Virginia, central Florida and Miami-Dade.

Then came the early exit polls that also were favorable to the president.

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.

"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."

Romney then said what they knew: it was over.

His personal assistant, Garrett Jackson, called his counterpart on Mr. Obama's staff, Marvin Nicholson. "Is your boss available?" Jackson asked.

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.

"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."

Their emotion was visible on their faces when they walked on stage after Romney finished his remarks, which Romney had hastily composed, knowing he had to say something.

Both wives looked stricken, and Ryan himself seemed grim. They all were thrust on that stage without understanding what had just happened.

"He was shellshocked," one adviser said of Romney.

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.

They thought intensity and enthusiasm were on their side this time - poll after poll showed Republicans were more motivated to vote than Democrats - and that would translate into votes for Romney.
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.

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.

They made three key miscalculations, in part because this race bucked historical trends:

1. They misread turnout. They expected it to be between 2004 and 2008 levels, with a plus-2 or plus-3 Democratic electorate, instead of plus-7 as it was in 2008. Their assumptions were wrong on both sides: The president's base turned out and Romney's did not. More African-Americans voted in Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida than in 2008. And fewer Republicans did: Romney got just over 2 million fewer votes than John McCain.

2. Independents. State polls showed Romney winning big among independents. Historically, any candidate polling that well among independents wins. But as it turned out, many of those independents were former Republicans who now self-identify as independents. The state polls weren't oversampling Democrats and undersampling Republicans - there just weren't as many Republicans this time because they were calling themselves independents.

3. Undecided voters. The perception is they always break for the challenger, since people know the incumbent and would have decided already if they were backing him. Romney was counting on that trend to continue. Instead, exit polls show Mr. Obama won among people who made up their minds on Election Day and in the few days before the election. So maybe Romney, after running for six years, was in the same position as the incumbent.

The campaign before the election had expressed confidence in its calculations, and insisted the Obama campaign, with its own confidence and a completely different analysis, was wrong. In the end, it the other way around.

"They were right," a Romney campaign senior adviser said of the Obama campaign's assessments. "And if they were right, we lose."
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by NecronLord »

CaptJodan wrote:Romney himself was caught flat footed without a concession speech (that fact alone convinced me that he was not fit to be president. You try and prepare for every possible outcome. And in an election, you take nothing to chance).
Are we certain other presidents do that? I am aware that say, Nixon had a speech about a potential Apollo 11 disaster prepared beforehand, but I'm not aware of other presidental hopefuls having concession speeches ready to go.
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by wautd »

I guess it's only a matter of time before repub conspiracy theorists start babbling about fraudulent elections. Romney should have won. After all, he had a mandate from GOD! (or so preaching pastor told me anyway :roll: )
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Re: Romney honestly thought he would win.

Post by Ziggy Stardust »

NecronLord wrote:Are we certain other presidents do that? I am aware that say, Nixon had a speech about a potential Apollo 11 disaster prepared beforehand, but I'm not aware of other presidental hopefuls having concession speeches ready to go.
Usually, the team of speech-writers on the campaign staff would prepare both a victory and concession speech. Its pretty standard political practice, even down to local elections. It is one thing if Romney wasn't prepared himself, or even his advisers, but the fact that his speech-writers were specifically unprepared is pretty telling.
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