A few hours earlier, across the street at the Convention Center, the campaign's supporters and volunteers fully expected Romney to be the nation's next president. Indeed, what was striking after Fox News called the race for Obama, at about 11:15 p.m., was how stunned so many of Romney's supporters were. Many said they were influenced by the prominent conservatives who predicted a big Romney win, and they fully expected Tuesday night to be a victory celebration.There's no way anyone with even the remotest access to the internet'and its myriad polling aggregator sites'would think they were headed toward any sort of big victory. That's why conservative media worked so hard to convince their audience that the polling was "skewed". They willfully made themselves breathtakingly stupid."I am shocked, I am blown away," said Joe Sweeney, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. "I thought I had a pretty good pulse on this stuff. I thought there was a trend that was going on underground."
And now, refusing to learn their lesson, they continue to willfully disregard the evidence.
Before Sandy, Romney's aides had watched him move up, point by point, in the national tracking polls. After Sandy, Romney slipped, Obama rose, and the race became a virtual tie.For the millionth time, this is pure fantasy! Let's look at those national trends, from HuffPo's poll aggregator:
Romney peaked just after his disastrous second presidential debate, well before the hurricane arrived. This is fact. By the time Sandy hit, Obama had already retaken the national lead. In fact, Sandy did nothing to move the numbers. The trends were set, both nationally, as you can see above, and in the top battleground states.
The effect of their reality distortion field was so powerful, in fact, that even the (theoretically) smart ones among them got sucked in:
"I volunteered in Pennsylvania, because we were going to win Pennsylvania and come up with 330 electoral votes," said Mike Stopa, a Harvard physicist (and keeper of the sometimes lonely website HarvardConservatives.com). "I had friends saying, 'I bet you that your optimism is poorly placed,' and they were right."They created their little bubble, ensconced themselves in their little alternate reality, and refused to let facts get in the way. It was the ultimate triumph of ideology over the real world.
It's downright stunning. And it would be something to cheer (more Akins and Mourdocks, please!), except that they take the same approach to important public policy issues. They ignored the polling data the same way they ignore climate change data, or scientific data, or birth certificate data.
And rather than learn their lesson from this election'that their pundit gods are full of shit and will mislead them when warranted or even drink the kool-aid themselves, they will continue on as if these last few weeks were a one-time aberration.
It was Sandy! It was Chris Christie! It was liberal Romney!
No the fuck it wasn't. And that idiocy isn't just hurting conservatives, which would be totally okay, but it's hurting our nation.
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