Posted on 11/12/2012 5:24:35 PM PST by Kaslin
In light of the revelation that Mitt Romney was "shell-shocked" by his loss last week, I've been pretty tough on the job performance of his campaign's internal pollsters, who clearly missed the mark -- resulting in costly tactical decisions down the stretch:
These analyses [of the "expand the map" strategy] make sense, but only within the context of the campaign truly believing that they were safe in other crucial must-have states -- a cataclysmically wrong assumption. When I stopped by Romney headquarters in Boston back in September, Newhouse said his team was anticipating a D+3 electorate in November. This seemed entirely reasonable to me, based on evidence from 2004, 2008 and 2010, but it turned out to be incorrect. The actual electorate this year was D+6. Post-election news reports reveal that Mitt Romney was "shell-shocked" by his loss, an outcome that can only be explained by shockingly flawed internal polling. Was that polling predicated on a D+3 model? If so, that would explain the huge disconnect between Boston's expectations and the final results. I'll reiterate that although the D+3 model seemed sensible on its face, it was the campaign pollsters' job to figure out if their assumptions comported with reality. In retrospect, their failure to do so looms very, very large.
As if to pour salt in the Romney campaign's gaping wound, David Axelrod tells Politico today that Team Obama's in-house pollster was deadly accurate in his projections:
POLITICO: What's the most important tool you had this time that you didn't have in '08?
AXELROD : "We had some solid accomplishments and proof points ... We knew a lot more about the electorate than we did in 2008. We could make much more precise judgments about the attitudes of voters, about what was important to individual voters, about who was likely to participate and who wasn't likely to participate. So we had great confidence in our numbers. I got reports every night -- all the senior people did -- from our analytics guys about where all these battleground states were. And they were remarkably close [to the actual result -- Joel] Benenson's polling, within a tenth of a percentage point in the battleground states. Our individual pollsters in their individual states -- incredibly close. What you want in a campaign is as little surprise as possible. Nothing happened on election night that surprised me -- nothing. Every single domino that turned over was in keeping with the model that our folks had projected."
Moral of the story: When you're working off of rock solid data, unpleasant surprises are far less likely to occur.
Yup....one of the guys who NAILED this election is a fellow Freeper called jackmercer who’s work you can look up in 2 minutes. Nate Silver killed it. All the best polls this year caught it. How many Romney voters do you think live in the inner-city.....almost zero I expect. Want to bet Romney’s numbers in the inner-city are the same as McCain & Bush ?
You're absolutely right. Zero's antics really makes it seems like he thought he was behind. And the low rally attendance and lack of yard signs sure made it look like he was behind.
Either the Dems play a really deep game, pretending to be weak when they are strong in order to make Romney complacent. Or they really believed same things Romney's camp did and it just happened that the level of fraud matched what the polls predicted.
i agree with you, but people are addicted to being played by the Saul Alinsky rules, which Fox news reinforces by encouraging Republicans to blame each other rather then face the obvious, that Democrats are systmatically using voter fraud, and they stole this election with early voting, too easy to throw votes out and ballot stuffing. Makes me wonder what the real purpose of Fox News is, to destract the voters and make us feel that we have a voice, while the Democrats steal our elections. These people hate the United States, they are drunk on political correctness, for them, this is about revenge.
It is very easy to have confidence in fabricated data.
Did they predict Obama would drop 7 million votes from 2008, and still win?
I doubt it.
Did they predict Romney would get 1 million less than the completely incompetent John McCain?
I doubt it.
It really explains why they couldn’t steal the House. They couldn’t manufacture enough fraud votes in those smaller districts.
We don’t have a semblance of a Republic NOW. The election we couldn’t afford to lose was 2008. We did.
The surprise is (a) when they vote 110-120%, and (b) the opponent gets 0.
No, the really big mistake was made by the big money who backed a predictable Luser again, thinking they could just roll the opposition like 2004 -- out-Rove them.
That, and shoving to the sidelines the one candidate who could have brought out the millions of conservatives who just stayed home -- Sarah Palin.
So people in the East would have hated her -- who cares? They voted for Obama anyway.
Donna Brazile, who worked in a couple of presdential campaigns for the Dems, told her ABC Sunday-morning roundtable buds last January that Romney was the weakest possible GOP candidate (which btw is why Axelrod went out of his way to job Herman Cain), and that every time Romney had a good primary night, Obama had a better one. She knew.
Republicans don’t fight back. Why shouldn’t they lose? And why don’t we question Republicans’ willingness to lose? 2.5M McCain voters stayed home this year — six times the size of Obama’s win in the vote. The big question, aside from the modeling screw-up, is why we all believed a Romney support by R’s that wasn’t there. I believe the most distressing view: R’s believe a crash is coming and want it hung around Obama’s neck.
He played it safe did not take it to Obama because he was afraid, just another Bush1, Dole and McCain, will the establishment party ever learn? He evidently was sooooo nice he had no clue who he was dealing with, the Chicago mob.
Not judging the accuracy of the theme about GOPsters abandoning their man to let Obama hang -- I kinda don't think so, given the Supreme Court and Obamacare stakes, not even mentioning the threat that Obozo will now ram through the sovereignty-alienating U.N. treaties the Senate has refused to ratify, or even consider, ever since the Clinton administration -- I just wanted to mention that the idea of a crash impending and Republicans wanting a Democrat to be in charge when it arrives (reverse Hoover) was also current in 2007, as a way of explaining meagre Republican early-money giving.
The theory was that Hillary's presidency was a foregone conclusion, which was fine with the Republican masters of the universe, who wanted her standing there when the financial avalanche arrived at the bottom of the hill.
Then Hank the Shank and Helicopter Ben knifed Lehman Brothers, and the avalanche arrived before Mr. Bush could get out of the way, and we've had to listen to that "it's all Bush's fault" crap ever since. How embarrassing.
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