Come, Drink In Delusional Mitt Romney’s Election-Night Sadness With Us

by Josh Fruhlinger

Tried real hard to find a picture of sad Mitt, but then we realized that his emotions don't show up on film, like a vampire'sOh boy, we have now reached our favorite part of the election cycle: the end! It’s great because (a) the stressful part is over and (b) all the low-level staffers for both campaigns start telling secrets to the reporters that they most want to sleep with. And so it was that the lucky folks at CBS, America’s old-person network, got the scoop on the tragic emotional landscape of the Romney-Ryan campaign’s final night, when everyone’s sincere belief in their inevitable victory ran head-first into reality. Join us for a gleefully annotated summary, after the jump!

Here is the best part of the sad tale of Mitt Romney’s election night: Mitt Romney and his people were totally confident that they were going to win. Unless, of course, they are so determined to maintain a brave face at all times that they feel a need to anonymously leak to the press after the fact that they ran the campaign in a delusional bubble? That would be even weirder, so let’s just take this statement at face value:

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.
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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.

Let that sink in for a minute: Team Romney was “unskewing” its internal polls, or maybe they were just using the numbers from the Unskewed Polls guy, who knows, but the point here is that they didn’t like the reality they were getting from their own data collection and thus felt a need to fix it to conform to their inner emotional truth like some sort of woo-woo Californian new ager. By contrast, when after the first debate Obama’s people began getting numbers indicating that everyone thought he did a crappy job, the campaign flipped out and Obama agreed to make some changes he wasn’t keen on, because he wanted to win but recognized that he might lose.

http://wonkette.com/489407/come-drink-in-delusional-mitt-romneys-election-night-sadness-with-us#more-489407