The Romney Campaign Was Full Of Poll Denialists
If the Romney campaign looked shocked on Election Night, that's because they didn't believe the polls either.
A Romney campaign post-mortem by CBS News’s Jan Crawford reveals that the Romney campaign, including the candidates and their wives, apparently all believed the skewed polls argument that we now know was completely untrue:
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.
Quite obviously, the Romney campaign was operating off the same set of faulty assumptions that conservatives bloggers and pundits were using to criticize the polls for the past five months or so.
They assumed that the 2008 turnout model as an anomaly and that turnout this year would be closer to the turnout we saw in 2010. In retrospect, this seems like an amateur error if only because it’s been a rather well-known historical fact that turnout in midterm elections is far different from the turnout typically seen in Presidential elections. They also incorrectly assumed that the President’s base support in the minority community would not turnout in the levels that it did in 2008. Once again, the only evidence for this was the turnout model for 2010 when President Obama himself was not on the ballot. In fact, as Crawford notes in her article, in the crucial swing states of Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, African-American turnout was actually higher in 2012 than it had been in 2012 even though overall turnout for this year appears to have been down from the levels it reached four years ago.
They assumed that the fact that state-level polls showed Independents breaking heavily for Romney was evidence that the polls were somehow skewed. In fact, the evidence clearly showed that the number of self-identified Independents had been increasing over the past several years at the same time that the number of self-identified Republicans was decreasing, an obvious indication that the high level of support for Romney among Independents was actually coming from people who used to identify themselves as Republicans rather than true “Independents.” Therefore, it was fairly obvious that the state-level polls were in fact no over-sampling Democrats in a manner that made the President’s standing in the polls seem larger than it actually was.
Finally, the Romney campaign and its allies in the conservative punditocracy assumed that the remaining undecided voters would vote for Romney in the end. In reality, exit polling shows that the majority of people who made their mind up within days of the election ended up voting for the President.
In short, the entire Romney campaign, and its support structure among conservative pundits and bloggers was based on a set of faulty and obviously overly optimistic assumptions about what kind of electorate the candidate was facing in 2012. To a large degree, these assumption and the poll skepticism that they supported were part of the overall negative attitude that the right has about the media, which they mostly believe is biased against them. When you believe that, it’s rather easy to believe that the polls that the media reports on are also deliberately biased not matter who fundamentally absurd that argument is when you really think about it. Nonetheless, I can’t help but think about how similar the Romney campaign going into battle with faulty intelligence and assumption about the 2012 Electorate with the Bush Administration going into Iraq with fault assumptions and intelligence about how the war would proceed. In the end, both endeavors ended in disaster.
Yes, but at least Romney’s delusions were blessedly shortlived and didn’t cost trillions of $ and thousands of lives.
It’s simply breath-taking that the Romney campaign was so closed off to reality, so much a part of the right wing bubble that they could’ve even allow for the possibility that non-winger information sources might be right.
I was relieved when Romney lost, but the reports coming out of the campaign make me think the country really dodged a bullet. Between the technological screw-up their ORCA GOTV operation turned out to be to their obstinate denial of political realities, these guys clearly didn’t know WTF they were doing.
While it would be nice if the results of this election would burst the whole right wing media bubble to let a little reality shine in, I sadly expect that they’re going to double down on the stupidity.
@Fiona: I with you on that. Where do these people come from?
I would be interested in a closer study of the Romney campaign that would focus on the organization behavior of the campaign. Romney is supposedly a rational data-driven personality. But who did he surround himself with. Was he the “smartest guy in the room’? Was there room and opportunity for dissent? What was the level of group-think that led to this disaster? Did he micro-manage? Something seriously wrong occurred beyond the candidate and his message. Stories about Project ORCA to this article point to something totally disfunctional.
We had a hearty guffaw at the election day revelation that Romney only wrote a victory speech, not a concession speech.
Of course, everyone just assumed that meant, he wrote a concession speech too but isn’t mentioning it because he’s projecting confidence. With all the other BS he lied about, hell, this one isn’t even bad.
But then it turns out, he actually didn’t write a concession speech. And part of the reason it took him so long to come out and talk was (1) they were holding out hope for the Karl Rove show and (2) he had to hastily jot down “I believe in America + some other words” on a handy scrap a paper.
That’s just nuts man. Nothing but kool aid for sale in Boston?
I’m not actually surprised by this.
I wonder if it was true of the Kerry campaign in ’04 as well.
The only thing Romney had to recommend him (apart from not being the incumbent in a weak-ish economy) was his supposed hyper-competence. His ability to manage stuff. Assess the facts. Handle crises. Turn things around.
And in the political sphere, that turned out to be entirely illusory. Suckered by bad data, making terrible tech decisions, flailing in crises.
But it isn’t just Romney. This is a teachable moment, people. Repeat after me: experience in “business” does not necessarily translate in any useful way to politics or governing.
I am becoming more and more convinced that Andy Borowitz was correct when he said the Romney campaign was close to being a national prank.
@Tom Hilton: You may be right but I wonder how much Romney actually managed. Sure, he bought and sold companies but did he ever operationally manage any companies dealing with issues of personnel, facilities, marketing, accounting, etc? Or was his involvement merely financial engineering? The way his campaign was managed suggests that no, he never really managed anything. And that his so-called competence was merely a sales job.
What? The Republican bromide of “business experience” isn’t a magical wizardly elixir that makes you automatically an expert and competent and efficient at every single thing you do?
Color me shocked…
The millions spent in Super PACs and generic, awful ads would have been better spent hiring Nate Silvers among statisticians and pollsters and computer experts, but they’re icky scientists who believe in evolution, the Universe had a “Big Bang,” and the Earth is getting warming due to the massive amounts of CO2 our cars and factories belch into the air. YUCK! SCIENCE!!
I agree in general, but think that we can dig into this a little. I think that if one has actual experience in managing a large project or operation that actually does something that that can translate to effective management of a campaign. However, if one manages a company that is mainly good at taking over other companies and firing people, then that doesn’t count for much in the real world of getting things done.
In other words, if Romney managed a real company, Bain Romney would have fired the other Romney.
This is too funny. They actually believed Fox propaganda and wingnut bloggers. As Colbert says, reality has a liberal bias. Holy moly. This story can’t be real, can it?
Reminds me of the scene in Animal House after the road trip with Flounder’s brother’s car: Wingnut bloggers (Otto) to Mitt (Flounder): you f-ed up, you trusted us. And then Blutto: my advice to you is to start drinking heavily.
@Lit3Bolt: those propeller head statisticians are just effeminate buzzkill – who wants them around? Mitt, with his extensive experience as a CEO, wants yes-men around him, not naysayers.
This is also a perfect description of Mitt’s tax plan: ‘tax cuts create growth and automatically pay for themselves.’
It’s the exact same style of thinking.
It’s all part of the GOP war against reality:
Looks like the Mitt Romney who believed in math wasn’t running this time out. Which is perfectly consistent with his pandering to the Republican base.
Mitt would have been our second Harvard MBA president (they even graduated the same year). The first one didn’t work out that well.
Being a good businessman (and I have my doubts that he was anything more than a financier) does not make you an economist. I don’t think Romney has a real grasp of economic issues.
I think he would have brought his Kool-Aid mentality to the White House, probably leading us into war with Iran among other things.
By they way, how pissed must Kool-Aid be at Jim Jones? He could’t just serve generic lemonade?
Interesting, according to Wikipedia, Jim Jones actually served Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid.
Your headline has one too many words in it.
That is indeed an excellent analogy.
As for business experience: management experience probably is helpful. But businesspeople are not macro economists. And macro vs. micro is at the heart of some of the key battles that have been going on.
The Romney campaign was actually smoking the stuff they were selling! Did’nt think they were that bad.
Epistemic closure is a b!tch.
Also, too, you can apparently be a math wiz on one area of your life and totally ignore or misunderstand math in another area. Orwell may have been onto something with his concept of doublethink.
This reinforces my belief that Romney is really dumb and ignorant. If Romney and his campaign didn’t know what electorate will turnout, what else didn’t they know, what didn’t they know about the impact of his econonic plan, the result of his foreign policies, if he had one, he seemed to be agreeing with the president a lot during the foreign policy debate. What else didn’t they know, that’s the big question.
The problem is that lots of people (including smart people) conflate the ability to construct a logical argument with being intellectual. Even the CBS news article makes that mistake. Explaining away the data using previously drawn conclusions is a fools game. The second you point out that one side ceased using the data to draw conclusions is the second you should stop taking that side seriously. There’s nothing intellectual about that.
Magical thinking. The essence of conservatism is having faith in what you want to be true, not on accepting what really is true. If you just clap hard enough — really, really hard — then Tinkerbell will come back to life!
It’s a political movement for children, basically.
You know what the really scary thing about this is? If Romney and Ryan were so disconnected from reality about something that really mattered to them, that had such real-life impact for their futures, what would they have been like if they’d actually won? Every time they encountered some real world fact that didn’t square with their delusions — economic data, foreign policy strategies, military capabilities, etc. — wouldn’t they just have rejected it out of hand?
I’d say we are seeing a picture of utter incompetence. Romney relied on a vote checking system called ORCA that ended up in complete disaster. Belief alone filled in the gaps.
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/334783.php
This can’t be said enough. And it’s no accident that this group is excessively religious, because that’s what religion is: faith.
@Fiona:
Remember, we all should have voted for Romney because he was such a great manager and had real-world business experience…..
Frankly, having seen what a hash he made of his campaign, in retrospect it now kind of surprises me that Bain Capital didn’t burn to the ground while he was running it.
Yes, it’s an incredible story. See Doug’s post.
@Tom Hilton:
Even if it did, I’m still not convinced Romney actually had any skill as a businessman, rather than just being an influence peddler making trade off his father’s political connections to help people rig the game in their favor.
@Scott:
Quite likely. But that says more about the room than it does about Romney.
Two key business skills are managing and selling. Mitt is actually very good at one of those things, and lousy at the other one.
For Obama, the situation is roughly reversed. Exhibit A: the first debate.
You know that the Romney-Ryan guys remind me of the most? Soviet-era Communists. One reason the Soviet Union was always so abysmal at producing quality goods was that managers were always under pressure to produce good numbers for the bosses, rather than quality product for the people. To succeed, to get ahead, you always had to juke the stats, to present an accepted picture that squared with socialist realism. Over time, they either all started believing their own propaganda, or had so corrupted the numbers that it was no longer possible to get any accurate picture of reality.
As with the Soviet Union, so with today’s conservatives: the image is more important than the reality.
The first lesson every drug dealer is taught is, don’t smoke your own stash. Seems the Romney campaign never learned that.
Excellent point, and of course deeply ironic. Also Baghdad Bob.
Hey! I resemble that remark.
@Rafer Janders:
The folks at Bain Capital made out like bandits, but the LBO focus on loading up companies with debt to provide shareholders with large short term gains came at the cost of long term economic growth, and helped to eff up the American economy. The LBO model, which Romney mastered, never seemed to me to be a viable economic model for the country. It also seemed that Romney learned his tax plan math from Bush II. We all know how that worked out.
I think a dirty little secret of Bain Capital is that it was mostly run by Bill Bain, and Mitt was a glorified salesman (something he knows how to do).
There’s a reason why it’s called Bain Capital, not Romney Capital.
You know who the Romney campaign really could have used working for them?
Some community organizers.
Yes:
Jesus Fucking Christ…a campaign trailing trying to spin polling data to show they are winning?!?!?! HOLY SHIT! That is like the first time in American history that ever happened! Grow up, folks! The Barrett Campaign in Wisconsin’s recall election kept the same script on the polling data
@Rafer Janders:
I was actually going to say the same thing, but I had to go look up the word I was trying to think of. Romney is essentially an American tolkachi. The soviet union was so corrupt that it was impossible to get anything done through official channels. Instead you had to hire a tolkachi who knew all the right people to call to get things done through the unofficial channels. Romney’s skill as a “businessman” are in the same nature. He doesn’t know anything about running a legitimate business, but he knows who to call if you want to get in touch with the grey-market.
Who cares? So losing campaigns have never spun disappointing polling into rainbows and gumdrops? Please. Screw yourselves
They lie to everyone else. They don’t lie to themselves. If you have an example, let’s see it.
Skew you.
@Xerxes:
Of course there is spin. There is also self-deception.
You know one of my thoughts about this thread? “You can drop the ‘poll’ part and still be right.”
A crew of denialists, who are used to being denialists, are at a great disadvantage. Conor Friedersdorf won the post election analysis with his observation that Republicans “were operating at a self-imposed information disadvantage.”
The poor guys are primed for it. After rejecting every kind of science for a decade, they are ready to deny _____.
@Rafer Janders: This thought has been percolating in my little brain for a while. Add to the institutional corruption of that culture the idea of political officers enforcing ideological purity and the denial of science (Lysenkoism) that didn’t match their ideology and you have a close description of the right wing in this country.
It is still mind boggling to me how a data driven guy like Romney did not believe the electorate would look like 2008, when every electorate since 1976 has become more diverse.
You deserve to lose if your that willfully ignorant.
@Jr:
I hate to be dismissive of Mr. Romney and his demographic, but I have no problem thinking that someone who self-identifies “I’m a data guy” would in fact, not be.
Or to put it more kindly, maybe Mr. Romney can read an annual report or a contract or a 10-K filing far better than Nate Silver. It’s a different skill set than statistical analysis.
Big data and impact on business is very new. If you want a “scary numbers guy” as your candidate, worry about someone out of FedEx, or Amazon, or Walmart.
@Console:
Conservatives seem to have developed a truncated view of skepticism. If they think of a plausible alternative explanation they deny the validity of evidence. A real skeptic would test the alternative explanation against the evidence and other available evidence to see if it held up. An example is the climate change skeptic at Berkeley who had a list of reason why he didn’t believe that the evidence showed what researchers claimed, so he set up an examination of all available climate data to test his alternative explanation. He discovered that his explanation was contradicted by the evidence, even when examined according to his terms, so he dropped his skepticism. Any serious analysis of the methodologies and results of all of the polling organizations would have led any rational skeptic to abandon the idea that pollsters were “oversampling” or over “weighting” democrats, but that second step was never taken. Skepticism is a critical part of analysis, especially when new evidence contradicts existing “knowledge”, but this was just blind faith in the existing belief.
@DRE:
The parallel to climate is a really good one. I saw a little animation recently about how temperature denial works. It showed yearly temperatures added one by one, and then lines fit to show falling temp. If you kept picking the right years, you could show “cooling” again and again. The only problem was that the animation ended with a fit for the whole data set, which showed clear warming.
The “skeptics” see a report of warming, dismiss statistics, and say “hey, I can get any number I want too.” That’s when they choose data for the answer they want.
Their basic unwillingness, with polls and climate, was to believe that data do produce a “best” answer, and not just the one you are shooting for.
There is an eerie science vs. faith theme to this election. Luckily, science won. Now let’s keep it going.
@john personna: Just the thought of a Walmart president gave me a shudder.
Reminds me of Facebook post put out by Walmart that I saw last week: “Hunting season begins this weekend at your local store”. I’ve already claimed the top of Aisle 3 for my hunting stand.
@J-Dub: Gonna get me a big ‘ol fat one this year!
I’ve said for years that the biggest problem with conservatives is that they believe their own BS. In response to Romney’s 47% video Paul Krugman said this much better by referencing Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. He talked about the “prolefeed”, the steady stream of misinformation fed to the mass of people outside the Party.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/when-the-inner-party-believes-the-prolefeed/
Now we understand why Romney played the third debate like a man protecting a lead, and wasted his last campaign appearances on states he was going to lose anyway. He believed his own BS.
@Scott:
As I commented on another thread yesterday – Bain Capital was a small organization. The organization, plan, and most of the personnel for the Olympics were in place long before Romney arrived. The government organization and most personell of the State of Massachussets were in place before Romney arrived. Barack Obama’s big, successful voter registration drive in Chicago was probably more of a management challenge than anything Romney has ever done. Obama certainly put together a campaign organization head and shoulders above Romney. I take comfort in the probability that much of the method is not readily transferable to a top down organization. May be tough for the GOPs to copy.
Did you see the video of Obama thanking some of the Chicago campaign staff? No teleprompter, heartfelt, and inspirational. Find it and watch it and think about John Cole’s headline:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/11/08/this-is-the-man-they-republicans-hate-with-every-fiber-of-their-being/
Romney thanked his staff by cutting off their credit cards before they could pay for the taxis they took home from his concession speech.
@Xerxes:
Who cares?
Republicans who want to win elections in the future should care.
J Dub, “By they way, how pissed must Kool-Aid be at Jim Jones?”
How about, “he doesn’t know shit from Shinola.”
I always wondered how the Shinola folks felt about this product comparison.
@jukeboxgrad:
ROTFL
@Xerxes:
We love you too, Honey Bunny
the Earth is getting warming due to the massive amounts of CO2 our cars and factories belch into the air. YUCK! SCIENCE
…I guess all those cars and factories were operating three shifts 365 days a week back when the planet was ‘getting warming’ when the Ice Age glaciers were melting…
YUCK! SCREWBALL LEFTY SCIENCE!
…365 days a week…
…note to self…I believe there are 365 days to a year, not a week…