By Daniel Lippman
WASHINGTON -- As Republicans search for reasons why they came up short in Tuesday's elections, anonymous Mitt Romney advisers have described what it was like to be with the former governor as he came to terms with his loss.
"He was shellshocked," one adviser told CBS News.
Another unnamed senior adviser explained that as returns came in and battleground states went into President Barack Obama's Electoral College column, they felt their paths to potential victory narrowing. CBS reports that the campaign was unprepared for this in part because it had ignored polling that showed the races favoring Obama. Instead, it turned to its own internal "unskewed" polls, which it believed more accurately reflected the situation on the ground. They didn't.
On the eve of the election, a number of polling aggregators, including HuffPost's Pollster and New York Times' FiveThirtyEight, showed Obama with a huge statistical advantage over Romney.
When it was clear that Romney had lost the race and had to concede, his personal assistant, Garrett Jackson, called his counterpart in the Obama campaign, Marvin Nicholson, to connect the two men.
As CBS' Jan Greenburg writes in her article:
More: Mitt Romney 'Shellshocked' After Lost Election, Adviser Says