Rethinking "shellshocked" Romney

Shellshocked!

One of Thursday's most attention-grabbing news stories was the slightly-sensational piece from CBS's Jan Crawford, that got unnamed campaign insiders to claim that Mitt Romney was "shellshocked" by losing the election on Tuesday.

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.

This was a popular story in the liberal blogosphere, if only for its schadenfreude-tastic nature, but also because it seems to confirm the most fundamental stereotypes about Republicans: they believe their own B.S.; they live in a closed ideological bubble; they're so anti-science it extends to all forms of being anti-evidence, including the polling concerning the very thing they're trying to win.

However, something doesn't smell right about the story: even with their attempts to unskew their own polling, the Romney camp had to have known they had no better than a bank-shot chance of winning. Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall shared some of my skepticism when he discussed the article, though he didn't connect the final dot. His contention:

Just too ridiculous. I can maybe believe that the Romney camp thought they had a fighting chance in Ohio ' after all the final result was pretty close. I simply cannot believe that they thought they were in such a strong position that they were going to try for a decisive electoral college win.

What's the final dot? The fact that we got a look under the hood at the Romney camp's pre-election internals, if ever so briefly. Remember the leaked Romney internals on Monday afternoon before the election? To start out, set aside the lack of specificity of the internals (no topline numbers, just vague descriptions of the margin in some states), and the unusual place it was leaked to (the Daily Mail, one of the UK's right-wing scandal sheets, though not a Rupert Murdoch property); also, forget for a moment that leaked internals are leaked selectively and leaked for a reason, and often reflect an absolute best-case scenario rather than the most likely state of play for a race.

What those internals said was that North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia were already "baked." They had Romney up 3 points in New Hampshire, 2 points in Iowa, and most importantly, 1 point in Ohio. No specific number was given for Colorado, though they said they were more bullish on Iowa than on Colorado. They also claimed a "tie" in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania (although for all we know, that may have meant a "statistical tie," the ultimate poll-reporting weasel word). Sounds like a Romney slam-dunk, right?

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