I’m still having trouble wholeheartedly accepting the idea that the Romney campaign believed they were going to win and were totally shocked when they didn’t. I still think they told a lot of lies to their donors and that they are kind of locked into a narrative that they were sincere in their confidence. When I saw that they had leaked some of their battleground polls from the last weekend of the campaign, it didn’t convince me otherwise, since those polls still showed Obama on track to win.
But, if there is any real evidence that Romney personally thought he had the election in the bag, it has to be his performance in the last two debates. Romney’s performance in the last debate, in particular, seemed to me to indicate that he thought he was in the lead and just needed to make no gaffes and he would win. The subject of the last debate was foreign policy, and Romney went out of his way to agree with the president’s policies even in areas where he had spent more than a year being a strident critic. I found his performance inexplicable at the time. Some analysts thought he was trying to move to the middle, but I felt like he was pulling his punches. He seemed like a boxer who knows he is ahead on the judges’ cards and just wanted to avoid a 12th round knockout.
I still don’t know if Romney really thought he was going to win, but he acted like it in the last debate. I have yet to see any rationale for him feeling that way, however.
I felt the same way about the 3rd debate. Romney thought he had it and he was doing a no mistake debate. His lack of any stand on foreign policy, except kissing Netanyahu’s ass more, probably contributed too.
Romney was rather boxed in for that third debate. Having made a fool out of himself when he traveled the world, and having jumped the shark on Benghazi, his campaign probably saw the risks as greater than the rewards. Remember, he had gotten burned several times around foreign policy. Even in the second debate, he had been burned when he tried to run the Benghazi talking point. So he turned every question back to the economy and tried to take it to Obama there.
Standing alone, that tells me little about whether Romney believed he was ahead. I agree that it makes no sense he’d be so overconfident. We all assumed the bravado was right from the Karl Rove BS playbook. So initially I shared Booman’s skepticism. However, the fact that several voices have all made the same claim, and no one has stepped out of the shadows to say otherwise, makes me wonder if they didn’t really drink the koolaid.
That Republican bubble just seems to get ever more sealed. They had their big win in 2010 and it foretold Obama’s inevitable demise, right? Inevitable, dammit! It’s surprising that the people running the circus would allow themselves to be conned. But given what happened with Orca, and many of the other boneheaded decisions made by the campaign, I’ve come around to the theory that Romney and his men were simply dumber than dirt.
Rich guys like Romney spend their whole lives in a bubble, with everyone around them thinking they walk on water. Romney appears to have surrounded himself with “yes” men. Salesmen like himself. Apparently they sold themselves.
When one lives inside a counterfactual bubble, the world as perceived through its walls is always warped.
I imagine they are forever trapped inside a Twilight Zone-like house of mirrors where the path loops back endlessly upon itself.
Perhaps overlooked was the GOP’s faith in the election’s deliverance by their Christian leaders who never missed a chance to proclaim the righteousness of a Right victory. Rest easy, God’s got this one, ha!
Perhaps all the while God, separate from those who claimed to speak for him, was celebrating the fruits of his creation busting their butts and doing what he meant mankind to do all along; work smart!
Yes, it’s particularly nice that deliverance came in the form of a hurricane, handled perfectly by the president. Global warming deniers get some comeuppance, though I’m pretty sure Obama would have won regardless.
Where’s the rationalizing for Romney’s belief in Iraqi WMDs and Saddam-bin Laden links? Where’s the rationalizing for his global warming denial? Where’s the rationalization for his belief that fiscal austerity is the right policy during recessions?
The intellectual process that lead Republicans to believe they were winning the election is a well-known, long-established one, right down to the conspiracy theory about the experts being corrupt and biased, and the willingness to seize on the statements of a single contrarian or charlatan as a way of getting “permission” to believe what they want.
I would as skeptical as you that Romney and his people were really fooled, if I hadn’t seen the same thing happen over and over again over the last two decades.
Never underestimate a person’s ability to believe something if their livelihood/future depends on believing it. Magical thinking isn’t limited to religious types, but it is a prerequisite for believing in the warped misrepresentation of Christianity the right idolizes.
But Frank, in this case, their livelihoods depended very, very much on accurately understanding the polling data. In a sense, this is exactly the opposite situation.
If they accurately understood the polling data, their donors would have been melting away early, the media would have lost as lot of their ad income, and there might also have been changes in the campaign strategy and team.
Are suggesting they could have changed the result with a better understanding of polling data? I doubt it. Perhaps if they had been working with less optimistic turnout models, they would have build a better GOTV operation, but that runs counter to the Republican CV that their voters always turn out and that GOTV is for community organisers and other assorted lowlife.
Well said. Good thinking.
These are faith based people.
Romney was in the doghouse all summer … even George Will publicly announced the hopelessness of the campaign.
Then the Miracle Of The First Debate happened, and was immediately embraced as deliverance. Romney never looked back. The goddess had smiled upon him at last, his mission finally validated.
He had transcended spreadsheets, and Republicans everywhere self-raptured. Legitimate rapture all around.
Beyond that David Atkins hammers the nail:
The Dynastic founders are always shrewd and ruthless. Then they inbreed with their own set and eventually beget brainless privileged idiots. Eventually, they get overthrown by a new shrewd and ruthless man out of nowhere who founds a new dynasty. Da Capo.
It sounds like since their media fortress of solitude did not give them enough comfort this year, they are going to go ballistic and create a new super impenetrable media world for their future political endeavors.
On second thought there was just too much money to be made from a campaign jolted with zillions of dollars. The truth was irrelevant as long as the spin kept the coffers full. The irony of Mitt the Capitalist head of the Capitalism-above-all party was skunked by guys just out to make a million.
It makes me wonder about certain conspiracy theories I have seen floating around, that Rove had the fix in, particularly in Ohio via electronic voting machine software trickery similar to their switch the vote effort in 2004. Then it wouldn’t matter what the polls said, Romney would show confidence. This also tracks with Roves overconfidence on election night fox coverage. But something went wrong — one theory is that Anonymous blocked the vote switch. We’ll probably never know the truth.
We really should do something about those e-vote machines though.
Restoring the integrity and transparency of the vote is the most important thing that citizens can do. It’s gotta be a grass-roots ongoing effort. We need to be squeaky wheels.
Our entire state went Diebold in 2002 (under our first modern era GOP Governor and a female Democratic SOS) and eliminated a perfectly viable optical scan system. There is no paper trail whatsoever. I ask the folks at the precinct every time I vote about this, and mostly it’s evident that none of them have given this any thought whatsoever. I vote in a largely GOP precinct.
I heard on the Bill Press show that the Republicans swept all the state offices in Ohio. I think Ohioans hated Romney personally. Romney counted on the Republican bent and vote suppression. But the vote counting had to be watched or surely they would have stolen it.
Was the counting of the votes in the down-ticket races closely monitored?
In Congressional races, Democrats underperformed in several states. This to me was evidence of the weaknesses of Obama’s campaign — he won more of a personality contest than a policy contest.
Yes, I agree. Obama won such a victory because he has way more personality than Romney. I don’t think the average voter feared Ryan, although they should have.
I think you still need to process the fact that to even contemplate that you, above all the other people on the planet, are worthy and capable of being the leader of the free World means you are probably not mentally well.
Romney has gotten everything he has ever desired. It doesn’t compute that he might not get the office he wants to buy.
It is also why we are genuinely lucky to have a president who is authentic and genuine in his humble belief he can do what is needed for the country and why it is so dangerous to get another leader who simply doesn’t get what the country actually needs.
I agree with Joe from Lowell that, yes, these guys probably actually were that overconfident because this is what they do.
I also agree with the linked post that this is proof – if any were needed – that Romney would have been a horrible president.
On the first point, I’ve seen this for years from people in Romney’s position, but I’ve had the “good fortune” to be closely associated with a PE transaction this year and it has only reinforced everything we know about people like Romney. They are supremely overconfident, their decisions are generally disasterous mistakes because they ignored any data they didn’t agree with and any advice from anyone outside their trusted circle. And when the results come in they blame others.
To give a simple summary – this PE firm is much like Bain, and given what I’ve seen of them if they ran a Presidential campaign they would do exactly what Romney did – adjust the numbers to match what they wanted to happen and convince themselves that they were doing a great job and victory was inevitable.
How would a team of managers like this do if given the White House? Well, think of the original Bush-appointed Iraqi proconsul, Paul Bremer. He showed up, unilaterally instituted a 15% flat tax and sat back expecting the free market to boom. When instead of the economy exploding the whole country exploded he had no plan B … because he KNEW that the free market would solve everything.
I revall Howard Dean saying that he was a scientist and to a scientist when facts don’t meet your theory you adjust the theory, but to these true believers when facts don’t meet your theory, you alter the facts.
Howard was the smartest (in overall intelligence) Presidential candidate I ever saw. I treasure the memory of shaking his hand at Nvy Pier in Chicago.
The simplest explanation. Romney’s staff believed their internal polls more than any other polls. Kos had an article showing that those internal polls were off by 6%-8%. But also that they did not show Romney wins in key swing states. But they did show a Romney win in Florida and Ohio, the two states where there was the most intense efforts to disenfranchise voters. The explanation is that they did not think that the court restraints on their efforts at disenfranchisement would prevent them from getting the victory.
The next simplest explanation depends on Karl Rove’s bizarre behavior on FoxNews on election night. What made Rove so certain that Ohio was going to fall their way? Was it just the fact that it had in 2004? It was very contrary to the last polls of Ohio. The day after, a tweet from an Anonymous source linked to a claim that hackers successfully prevented the manipulation of Ohio’s vote tablulation programs by an external set of programs. The report provided technical details of the nature of the holes in the Ohio tabulating programs, the method intended to fix the vote, and the actions that were taken to ensure that that was frustrated. There was enough there there to merit some independent confirmation. Of course, that won’t happen because it might create a Constitutional crisis and provoke a barrage of counterclaims from Republicans.
It seems likely Romney believed he would win, and not just from candidate optimism. And he lashed back immediately, having all the campaign credit cards disabled.
The shock was highly emotional for Romney and the campaign because they had just been beaten in a down economy by the first black President, who his party had demonized non-stop for five years. In their cognitive universe, that was not ever supposed to happen.
Disagree. He acted like a rich, spoiled, entitled brat who knew that even if he lost, he’d still be stinking rich.
Romney and Ryan lied consistently about everything throughout the campaign. It would be out character to stop now.
I think my original premise may still be right: that Romney knew he was toast in early summer, blamed the extreme right, and picked Ryan to deflect as much of the blame away from his own gaffes as he could. He obviously doesn’t care about issues – it’s all about ego and money for him. After the shock of being proclaimed the winner of the first debate in spite of telling about 73 blatant lies, he must’ve certainly had a week or two of excitement before coming back to reality and reverting to Plan A. On the foreign policy debate I think he was just shell-shocked from committing a major gaffe every time he touched on foreign policy, and determined not to gaffe again. Also, his “victory” in debate 1 resulted from changing all his policies (like pre-existing conditions) in real time, only to deny them hours later.
And broadly speaking, this overall approach (whether intentional or not) worked quite well. The media spin is focused on:
From the beginning – I mean, since “Who let the dogs out” in 2004 – Romney has been the most laughably pathetic candidate of all time. To come out this with as little humiliation as he has is nothing short of miraculous. Declare victory and go back to La Jolla and play with the car elevator.
Or like the designated loser in a fix making sure that he didn’t accidentally win. We’ll never know.
Or…did Anonymous foil the Rovian vote fixers? We’ll never know that, either.
Here’s what we do know, though.
Business as usual. Obama wins, PermaGov wins.
In a landslide.
Bet on it.
Watch.
You need evidence about this situation?
OK.
Here.
Are the architects of the housing bubble going to jail?
No.
Ar the liars who brought us the Iraq War going to jail?
No.
Are the elite bankers who brought us to the brink of financial collapse going to jail?
No. In fact…many of them are now Obama’s top financial advisors.
Talk about foxes in henhouses!!!
WTFU.
AG
I don’t know if Willard was overconfident.
I am, however, quite convinced that everyone working for Willard was nothing but a grifter, and saw him as their long con. Nobody had anything nice to say about Willard unless they got a check from him. So, to keep the checks coming, they kept pushing his confidence.
I am also a conspiracy theorist, and I believe a great part of the overconfidence, was the obvious attempts to steal Ohio and Florida. Sorry, I can’t get past the Rover meltdown about Ohio. The rest of Fox was in mourning, when Ohio was called – Rove was not – he was in shock. Plus, there’s that little thing of one of the Romney sons having ‘ invested in election machines. Just accuse me of having on the tinfoil hat.
Then, there is the part of entire Romney campaign honestly believing that the bullshyt they did during the primaries against those amateurs and grifters of the GOP Clown Car was going to apply to the team that had defeated the Clinton Machine and gotten a Black Man ELECTED President They thought that they were gonna voter suppress five million Americans, and nobody was gonna call them on it…and that there would be no REACTION from those who were under attack.
Never ever forget that Willard thought he was ENTITLED to be President of the United States.
ENTITLED.
Guess the GOP learned something since 2000 when there was a live TV feed from GWB’s suite and we all saw him go ballistic when FL was called for Gore. In that instant I said, “OMG – they fixed FL.” Would have never been seen or even suspected if Gore hadn’t won the state by such a large margin.
Like you, I tend to think that they had something similar in play this year but stealing several states is a tall order — particularly when he couldn’t even get 47% in NH, WI, IO, and CO.
I really think that’s it. But in the end, they couldn’t pull it off. As to WHY they couldn’t pull it off, there are various theories. My own is simply that Obama’s leads were too high, that the polling (by the end) was pointing too strongly to the probability of an Obama victory, and too many people were watching for any monkey business. Another theory is that the massive disfunction of their Orca program made the heist impossible. Another theory is that that wasn’t exactly an accident. Whatever the truth,it’s not what Karl Rove expected.
yes, Obama leads high. Also, if they’d tried it, imo, Obama would have challenged. Nevertheless the Anonymous claim is intriguing. There was a fairly extensive thread on it over at the Orange Place, making the point that the ORCA system wasn’t the main focus of the campaign’s investment in IT.
You mean this?
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/17/1162704/-Anonymous-claims-to-have-foiled-Karl-Rove-s-Plans-
to-Steal-Election
Thanks, I’ll read it.
I have a feeling you may have been referring to the one from two days earlier. Anyway, I knew some of this stuff, but learned some more from the Nov. 17th thread I linked above.
yes, but your link helped me find this one; I found the comments v. interesting.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/17/1162678/-Anonymous-claims-it-stopped-Karl-Rove-from-hacking
-the-vote
the one I linked to [to which I linked], bondibox had a much more extensive discussion, worth reading the comments if you are interested in the speculation
That Romney really thought he was going to win? What sticks in my mind is that he hired a fireworks company for 25K to celebrate his victory and also that he had no concession speech prepared.