The embarrassing internal GOP polling that showed Mitt Romney winning the election
The former governor could be forgiven for assuming the presidency was in his grasp — his own polling was way off the mark
Mitt Romney famously did not write a concession speech on Election Night. There seemed little point, so supremely confident was he that he'd emerge the victor — based on late-in-the-game internal polling. Then came the actual results which, by all accounts, were a complete surprise to his campaign, even though they matched up with an aggregate of public polls. Team Romney had badly miscalculated the electorate's composition, and underestimated President Obama's ability to turn out his supporters. The New Republic's Noam Scheiber got his hands on some of the campaign's deeply flawed final in-house polling, which showed Romney with leads in key swing states:
Newhouse also had Romney and Obama tied in Iowa, which Obama went on to win by nearly six points. Furthermore, the Romney campaign reportedly thought it would win Virginia and Florida, two states for which the internal polls remain unknown. Finally, Newhouse says he thought the campaign was within two points of Obama in Ohio, and "generally believed it had momentum in the final few days of the race," says Scheiber. Put together, the campaign thought it had the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.
Needless to say, none of this was true, especially in Ohio. "Two points is a pretty deep hole to climb out of in such a short time period," says Maggie Burns at Politico, which means that, in addition to flawed polling, the Romney campaign may have been indulging in some magical thinking.
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Ryu Spaeth is deputy editor at TheWeek.com. Follow him on Twitter.
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