Romney Campaign "Unskewed" Internal Polls

[AceRothstein]

Adviser: Romney "shellshocked" by loss - CBS News

You can't make this shit up folks. This article also confirms what I had seen others speculate on. The reason for the big difference in D & R turnout and the Independent vote going to Romney is because so many R's have turned Independent but continue to vote R

 

[Greenbeard]

I honestly thought Romney was just cynical enough to play on the fantasies of the supremely self-deluded folks who now make up the GOP base.

Knowing that even he might've been drinking the kool-aid himself is borderline frightening.

That said, seeing how shocked and betrayed the dittoheads have been this week after the massive lies and propaganda fed them by trusted conservative media figures were exposed so grandly has made this victory infinitely more enjoyable. These people actually believed a Romney landslide was imminent, reality be damned.

 

[AceRothstein]

I honestly thought Romney was just cynical enough to play on the fantasies of the supremely self-deluded folks who now make up the GOP base.

Knowing that even he might've been drinking the kool-aid himself is borderline frightening.

That said, seeing how shocked and betrayed the dittoheads have been this week after the massive lies and propaganda fed them by trusted conservative media figures were exposed so grandly has made this victory infinitely more enjoyable. These people actually believed a Romney landslide was imminent, reality be damned.

I guess it doesn't make them look as desperate for going after PA, MI, WI & MN but it makes them look fairly dumb as it cost them FL, VA & CO where Romney was polling pretty well a few weeks ago.

 

[candycorn]

I'm willing to give the Governor a pass on this one. If he doesn't believe, he can't expect any one else to.

As for the tactics at the end of the campaign, he didn't have a choice. His campaign was such a clusterf**k from the moment the general election started that he planned poorly, executed even more poorly, and in the end he looked desperate because he was: it was the classic case of a kid not studying for an exam she knows is coming.

The money spent in PA, MI, WI, and MN was not done because he thought he could win. Local TV & Radio run the ads for the President, sure. But the local races start spending their money much later in the cycle because they have so much less to spend. Stations have to run those spots.

If you have a TV station, about 15-20 minutes of every hour are going to be commercials. That is 480 minutes max. So that puts 960 spots of thirty seconds on the air. If the station is a network affiliate, most of that ad time is taken up already with commercials for other programming, national sponsors, etc.... So the local stations may get 25% of that 960 spots or what amounts to 240 commercials of 30 seconds.

Advertisers are only really going to want the percentage of 240 spots that take place between 6 AM and 10 PM so 8 of the hours (1/3 of the spots or 80 of them) are untenable for the campaigns. So that leaves 160 commercial slots. Equal time means you have to make time available to both sides. Obama is there--trust me. So you can only get half of what is left in a binary contest. But there are Senate races, House Races, Local races, referendums, bond elections, etc... So about around 10/15 or so it is no longer binary. So around 10/15 or so, you started seeing money flow to MN, MI, WI, and PA.

Now, if he would have run a campaign to where he had layed some groundwork and truly tried to make it a contest, the "hail mary" in October may have had some legs. But that didn't happen.

This could have been mitigated by advertising nationally on Cable TV. I honestly do not remember seeing one Romney ad on cable TV. And, no, I do not watch MSNBC very much except in the morning. CNBC is on in one of our break rooms where we have our Kuerig (sp?) machines. Never recall seeing Romney on there. Sometimes Bloomberg is on. Not there. The Young and the Restless didn't have many of his ads.

I saw Obama's on quite often.

What I would have done if I were Romney was pick Rob Portman and basically tell him that he is going to campaign 100% in Ohio. Then have Romney stick to 4 states, NC (which he won), FL, NH, and VA. He came close in Florida, lost NH by 5% and VA by 3 percent according to Electoral-Vote.com. If you add those 5 states up, he gets 270. Hindsight is 20/20 I know but the graph in Ohio was this:

The Blue is seldom under the red. It isn't hard to see that the road to the White House that goes through Ohio is narrow. He was much stronger in VA, would have been stronger in Ohio with Portman on the ticket, and could have focused on Florida. Hindsight, I know.

 

[del]

hubris

 

[Greenbeard]

I'm willing to give the Governor a pass on this one. If he doesn't believe, he can't expect any one else to.

There's a difference between believing you can win and skewing your own internal polls to blind you to what's actually happening in the campaign.

The latter leads to misappropriation of resources and bad strategy decisions. When Romney went into Pennsylvania, I assumed the Obama folks were correct: the Romney camp recognized the rest of the industrial Midwest, including Ohio, was pretty much off the table and was throwing a Hail Mary. I falsely believed Mr. Data was a member of the reality-based community. Now CBS tells me this:

Those [flawed polling] 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.

The Romney campaign legitimately didn't realize they were about to lose every single swing state aside from North Carolina. Talk about pissing away a billion dollars. Anyone who gave Romney a cent has a right to be furious at their political malpractice.

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Richard Feynman

 

[auditor0007]

I'm willing to give the Governor a pass on this one. If he doesn't believe, he can't expect any one else to.

As for the tactics at the end of the campaign, he didn't have a choice. His campaign was such a clusterf**k from the moment the general election started that he planned poorly, executed even more poorly, and in the end he looked desperate because he was: it was the classic case of a kid not studying for an exam she knows is coming.

The money spent in PA, MI, WI, and MN was not done because he thought he could win. Local TV & Radio run the ads for the President, sure. But the local races start spending their money much later in the cycle because they have so much less to spend. Stations have to run those spots.

If you have a TV station, about 15-20 minutes of every hour are going to be commercials. That is 480 minutes max. So that puts 960 spots of thirty seconds on the air. If the station is a network affiliate, most of that ad time is taken up already with commercials for other programming, national sponsors, etc.... So the local stations may get 25% of that 960 spots or what amounts to 240 commercials of 30 seconds.

Advertisers are only really going to want the percentage of 240 spots that take place between 6 AM and 10 PM so 8 of the hours (1/3 of the spots or 80 of them) are untenable for the campaigns. So that leaves 160 commercial slots. Equal time means you have to make time available to both sides. Obama is there--trust me. So you can only get half of what is left in a binary contest. But there are Senate races, House Races, Local races, referendums, bond elections, etc... So about around 10/15 or so it is no longer binary. So around 10/15 or so, you started seeing money flow to MN, MI, WI, and PA.

Now, if he would have run a campaign to where he had layed some groundwork and truly tried to make it a contest, the "hail mary" in October may have had some legs. But that didn't happen.

This could have been mitigated by advertising nationally on Cable TV. I honestly do not remember seeing one Romney ad on cable TV. And, no, I do not watch MSNBC very much except in the morning. CNBC is on in one of our break rooms where we have our Kuerig (sp?) machines. Never recall seeing Romney on there. Sometimes Bloomberg is on. Not there. The Young and the Restless didn't have many of his ads.

I saw Obama's on quite often.

What I would have done if I were Romney was pick Rob Portman and basically tell him that he is going to campaign 100% in Ohio. Then have Romney stick to 4 states, NC (which he won), FL, NH, and VA. He came close in Florida, lost NH by 5% and VA by 3 percent according to Electoral-Vote.com. If you add those 5 states up, he gets 270. Hindsight is 20/20 I know but the graph in Ohio was this:

The Blue is seldom under the red. It isn't hard to see that the road to the White House that goes through Ohio is narrow. He was much stronger in VA, would have been stronger in Ohio with Portman on the ticket, and could have focused on Florida. Hindsight, I know.

Romney was not going to win Ohio due to his stance on Chrysler and GM. People just don't understand how tied in jobs are in Ohio to the auto industry. If Chrysler was forced to liquidate, the Toledo area would have seen unemployment jump to 20% as the loss in income for so many workers would have had an immensely negative effect on the rest of the economy in northwest Ohio.

 

[auditor0007]

I'm willing to give the Governor a pass on this one. If he doesn't believe, he can't expect any one else to.

There's a difference between believing you can win and skewing your own internal polls to blind you to what's actually happening in the campaign.

The latter leads to misappropriation of resources and bad strategy decisions. When Romney went into Pennsylvania, I assumed the Obama folks were correct: the Romney camp recognized the rest of the industrial Midwest, including Ohio, was pretty much off the table and was throwing a Hail Mary. I falsely believed Mr. Data was a member of the reality-based community. Now CBS tells me this:

Those [flawed polling] 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.

The Romney campaign legitimately didn't realize they were about to lose every single swing state aside from North Carolina. Talk about pissing away a billion dollars. Anyone who gave Romney a cent has a right to be furious at their political malpractice.

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Richard Feynman

It truly was astonishing how so many Romney supporters believed that not only were they going to win, but they were going to win with over 300 electoral votes. Even George Will thought that was the case. BTW, I lost a lot of respect for him after he made that idiotic statement.

What all of those conservative pollsters missed was the turnaround. Romney did pick up a ton of momentum after the first debate, and he probably actually did have a minuscule lead for a brief moment, but the momentum headed back to Obama, even before Sandy hit. Because Obama had led in most state polls prior to the first debate, when the momentum shifted back to Obama, it really was easy to see that Obama was going to win big. I predicted that he would hit 332 in the EC, and most people called me an idiot. Even die hard Dems here on the board couldn't see Obama winning that big, but if you watched the polls it was obvious. The only question was Florida, and I felt it would move to Obama because of momentum that had headed back to Obama over the last few days, that and I also believed that the conservative pollsters model was flawed, which it was.

 

[editec]

I never even attempt to call elections.

I've seen too many shocking outcomes in the last 50 years to have much confidence in polling.

And the electoral college votes make the whole issue of the national zietgeist irrelevant.

What I do think is significant and distrubing too is this:

Mitt lost this election by just under 3,000,000 votes, roughly by 2 percentage points.

To me that says that this nation is very evenly divided into two distinctly different philosophical camps.

And there really isn't enough common ground for those philosophies to compromise.


The visions of the kind of America each philpsophy wants are so different that compromise is next to impossble.


It's going to be a long four years, folks.

 

[Grandma]

I'm willing to give the Governor a pass on this one. If he doesn't believe, he can't expect any one else to.

As for the tactics at the end of the campaign, he didn't have a choice. His campaign was such a clusterf**k from the moment the general election started that he planned poorly, executed even more poorly, and in the end he looked desperate because he was: it was the classic case of a kid not studying for an exam she knows is coming.

The money spent in PA, MI, WI, and MN was not done because he thought he could win. Local TV & Radio run the ads for the President, sure. But the local races start spending their money much later in the cycle because they have so much less to spend. Stations have to run those spots.

If you have a TV station, about 15-20 minutes of every hour are going to be commercials. That is 480 minutes max. So that puts 960 spots of thirty seconds on the air. If the station is a network affiliate, most of that ad time is taken up already with commercials for other programming, national sponsors, etc.... So the local stations may get 25% of that 960 spots or what amounts to 240 commercials of 30 seconds.

Advertisers are only really going to want the percentage of 240 spots that take place between 6 AM and 10 PM so 8 of the hours (1/3 of the spots or 80 of them) are untenable for the campaigns. So that leaves 160 commercial slots. Equal time means you have to make time available to both sides. Obama is there--trust me. So you can only get half of what is left in a binary contest. But there are Senate races, House Races, Local races, referendums, bond elections, etc... So about around 10/15 or so it is no longer binary. So around 10/15 or so, you started seeing money flow to MN, MI, WI, and PA.

Now, if he would have run a campaign to where he had layed some groundwork and truly tried to make it a contest, the "hail mary" in October may have had some legs. But that didn't happen.

This could have been mitigated by advertising nationally on Cable TV. I honestly do not remember seeing one Romney ad on cable TV. And, no, I do not watch MSNBC very much except in the morning. CNBC is on in one of our break rooms where we have our Kuerig (sp?) machines. Never recall seeing Romney on there. Sometimes Bloomberg is on. Not there. The Young and the Restless didn't have many of his ads.

I saw Obama's on quite often.

What I would have done if I were Romney was pick Rob Portman and basically tell him that he is going to campaign 100% in Ohio. Then have Romney stick to 4 states, NC (which he won), FL, NH, and VA. He came close in Florida, lost NH by 5% and VA by 3 percent according to Electoral-Vote.com. If you add those 5 states up, he gets 270. Hindsight is 20/20 I know but the graph in Ohio was this:

The Blue is seldom under the red. It isn't hard to see that the road to the White House that goes through Ohio is narrow. He was much stronger in VA, would have been stronger in Ohio with Portman on the ticket, and could have focused on Florida. Hindsight, I know.

There were plenty of ads on cable tv.

You know, it's illegal to show ads where people actually drink the alcohol being advertised, and it's illegal to advertise cigarettes. Why can't political ads, or at least those that didn't pass FactCheck be outlawed?

 

[Dick Tuck]

Clearly, Romney drank the Kool Aid, and believed the story of the Unskewed Unhinged. Where's all these morons who said that most of the polls were wrong, because they were skewed to Democrats? I didn't expect African Americans to show the same turnout, but believed that Hispanics would be the ones all fired up. Perhaps it was just good luck, but I turned out to be right.

 

[Truthmatters]

Adviser: Romney "shellshocked" by loss - CBS News

You can't make this shit up folks. This article also confirms what I had seen others speculate on. The reason for the big difference in D & R turnout and the Independent vote going to Romney is because so many R's have turned Independent but continue to vote R

anyone who talks in the internets knows how many people there are who say EVERYTHING all the republicans say and believe all the same lies the republicans believe but HATE being labeled a republican.


How very very childish to hate the label so much and yet follow blindly all the platform.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Adviser: Romney "shellshocked" by loss - CBS News

You can't make this shit up folks. This article also confirms what I had seen others speculate on. The reason for the big difference in D & R turnout and the Independent vote going to Romney is because so many R's have turned Independent but continue to vote R

I fervently hope that at some time in the near future you are blessed with the insight to realize what a terrible mistake you have made.

 

[AceRothstein]

Adviser: Romney "shellshocked" by loss - CBS News

You can't make this shit up folks. This article also confirms what I had seen others speculate on. The reason for the big difference in D & R turnout and the Independent vote going to Romney is because so many R's have turned Independent but continue to vote R

I fervently hope that at some time in the near future you are blessed with the insight to realize what a terrible mistake you have made.

This thread has nothing to do with who I wanted to win and everything to do with how big of a joke the Romney campaign was.

 

[Dick Tuck]

Adviser: Romney "shellshocked" by loss - CBS News

You can't make this shit up folks. This article also confirms what I had seen others speculate on. The reason for the big difference in D & R turnout and the Independent vote going to Romney is because so many R's have turned Independent but continue to vote R

I fervently hope that at some time in the near future you are blessed with the insight to realize what a terrible mistake you have made.

I fervently hope that at some time in the near future you are blessed with the insight to realize what a great decision the American people made.

 

[jillian]

I'm willing to give the Governor a pass on this one. If he doesn't believe, he can't expect any one else to.

There's a difference between believing you can win and skewing your own internal polls to blind you to what's actually happening in the campaign.

The latter leads to misappropriation of resources and bad strategy decisions. When Romney went into Pennsylvania, I assumed the Obama folks were correct: the Romney camp recognized the rest of the industrial Midwest, including Ohio, was pretty much off the table and was throwing a Hail Mary. I falsely believed Mr. Data was a member of the reality-based community. Now CBS tells me this:

Those [flawed polling] 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.

The Romney campaign legitimately didn't realize they were about to lose every single swing state aside from North Carolina. Talk about pissing away a billion dollars. Anyone who gave Romney a cent has a right to be furious at their political malpractice.

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Richard Feynman

It truly was astonishing how so many Romney supporters believed that not only were they going to win, but they were going to win with over 300 electoral votes. Even George Will thought that was the case. BTW, I lost a lot of respect for him after he made that idiotic statement.

What all of those conservative pollsters missed was the turnaround. Romney did pick up a ton of momentum after the first debate, and he probably actually did have a minuscule lead for a brief moment, but the momentum headed back to Obama, even before Sandy hit. Because Obama had led in most state polls prior to the first debate, when the momentum shifted back to Obama, it really was easy to see that Obama was going to win big. I predicted that he would hit 332 in the EC, and most people called me an idiot. Even die hard Dems here on the board couldn't see Obama winning that big, but if you watched the polls it was obvious. The only question was Florida, and I felt it would move to Obama because of momentum that had headed back to Obama over the last few days, that and I also believed that the conservative pollsters model was flawed, which it was.

i thought florida was going to go to romney. i figured the panhandle was his; i figured miami was his, i figured the old jews in boca were his.

that one flummoxed me.

 

[mamooth]

The scary thing is that people as utterly clueless as the Romney team could have been put in charge of foreign policy and nuclear weapons. America really, really dodged a bullet here, on so many levels.

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

Adviser: Romney "shellshocked" by loss - CBS News

You can't make this shit up folks. This article also confirms what I had seen others speculate on. The reason for the big difference in D & R turnout and the Independent vote going to Romney is because so many R's have turned Independent but continue to vote R

 

[Plasmaball]

Their emotion was visible on their faces when they walked on stage after Romney finished his remarks, which Romney had hastily composed, knowing he had to say something.

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.

2. Independents. State polls showed Romney winning big among independents. Historically, any candidate polling that well among independents wins. But as it turned out, many of those independents were former Republicans who now self-identify as independents. The state polls weren't oversampling Democrats and undersampling Republicans - there just weren't as many Republicans this time because they were calling themselves independents.

I find these to be the most interesting.

The last quoted part i find people will just ignore.

 

[AceRothstein]

Their emotion was visible on their faces when they walked on stage after Romney finished his remarks, which Romney had hastily composed, knowing he had to say something.

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.

2. Independents. State polls showed Romney winning big among independents. Historically, any candidate polling that well among independents wins. But as it turned out, many of those independents were former Republicans who now self-identify as independents. The state polls weren't oversampling Democrats and undersampling Republicans - there just weren't as many Republicans this time because they were calling themselves independents.

I find these to be the most interesting.

The last quoted part i find people will just ignore.

The last part you quoted was pointed out by a few posters here recently, not sure if you were one who did so. All of the Republicans on here decried that it wasn't true. Whoops.