Romney camp blaming Sandy for their upcoming loss

Losing. Always. Via HoundDog's diary, looks like Team Red is casting about for excuses:

Campaign sources concede superstorm Sandy stalled Romney's momentum. For eight straight days, polls showed him picking up support. The campaign's internal polling, which is using different turnout models than most public polls, had him on solid ground in Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Iowa. He had a slight lead or was tied in Ohio, New Hampshire and Wisconsin and was in striking distance in Pennsylvania, a state Republicans hadn't won since Ronald Reagan in 1984. ...

But then came something very big: a natural disaster that left a path of death and destruction on the East Coast. Suddenly, there was little talk about small things.

Those leads in Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Iowa still hold in the internal polls, campaign sources say, but Romney's movement flattened out or, as the campaign likes to say, "paused." Nevada is now off the table, and those neck-and-neck swing states are even tighter.

Fact is, Romney's "momentum" had already stalled, days before Sandy. Here is Huffington Post's national trendlines, showing the major events since the beginning of October. Blue is Obama, red is Romney.

NATIONAL

As you can see, Obama's post-first debate swoon began reversing right after the vice presidential debate, and picked up considerably after the third debate. Romney's rise stalled right after the second presidential debate, and began a slow but steady downward trajectory that has continued unabated to the present day.

The same trends show up in Ohio, also from HuffPo's aggregate:

OHIO

Romney has been steadily trending downward in the aggregate since the vice-presidential debate, while Obama has been steadily trending up since just after the second debate. Nothing in this graph suggests that Romney had any appreciable pre-Sandy momentum.

Then again, Ohio was always the most solid of Obama firewalls. What about Virginia, a state in which Romney led in a handful of polls?

VIRGINIA

Funny how these all follow the same trajectory, more or less. Obama has been rising and Romney has been falling ever since the second presidential debate.

In all these cases, Sandy had nothing to do with any of Romney's movement. He was on a downward trajectory since mid-October. All that talk about "mittmentum" was pure bullshit. The data never supported it. Yet as the inevitable approaches, Republicans must now find a way to justify their looming loss after spending so much time conning their supporters into believing they were headed toward big victories.

So why not blame a hurricane, and that sellout New Jersey governor while they're at it?

The irony is that Sandy was caused, in large part, thanks to global climate change -- the same climate change conservatives are hell-bent on doing nothing to fix. Therefore, it would only be fitting if they lost the 2012 election because of a storm caused by the very thing they refuse to do anything about.

But nah. Their loss had nothing to do with Sandy. They simply nominated the wrong candidate at the wrong time, and alienated pretty much everyone outside their white male southern base.

Update: Look who else are using Sandy as an excuse to shake off hilariously wrong prediction of Romney landslide:

Dick Morris: "Until its waves crashed into the New Jersey shore, the election was well in hand for the Romney campaign."
— @philipaklein via TweetDeck RT @EWErickson: A bunch of friends emailing their worry that Sandy + Chris Christie has shifted the race toward Obama.
— @jaketapper via TweetDeck