Romney advisers are telling CBS News that there wasn’t one person on the Romney campaign who saw the loss coming, and the GOP presidential candidate was “shellshocked” by the results. Here’s what they have to say:
- “We went into the evening confident we had a good path to victory…I don’t think there was one person who saw this coming.”
- “There’s nothing worse than when you think you’re going to win, and you don’t…It was like a sucker punch.”
- Romney “was shellshocked.”
The CBS story indicates that the Romney team even bought into the “unskewed polls” theory, believing that the polls dramatically underestimated Republican turnout and overestimated Democratic enthusiasm.
This report comes after other indications that the Romney campaign was disregarding polling data. On election night, the Romney campaign told the press it didn’t have a concession speech prepared. Karl Rove went against Fox News and questioned whether Ohio was going to Obama, contradicting overwhelming electoral analysis. And Wednesday, Romney’s website briefly displayed a page indicating he had won the presidency before it was taken down.
Should the Romney campaign have listened to New York Times analyst Nate Silver instead of Fox News?