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November 30, 2012 08:42 PM UTC

Colorado Internal Polls Reveal Why Romney Never Saw It Coming

  • 24 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

Our friend Craig Hughes of RBI Strategies Tweeted not long after the election:

Well, as The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber reports today, Hughes was more right than anybody knew–that is, about what Republicans, around the country but particularly here in Colorado, believed would be the outcome going into an election they were about to lose.

It’s no secret that the Romney campaign believed it was headed for victory on Election Day. A handful of outlets have reported that Team Romney’s internal polling showed North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia moving safely into his column and that it put him ahead in a few other swing states. When combined with Ohio, where the internal polling had him close, Romney was on track to secure all the electoral votes he needed to win the White House. The confidence in these numbers was such that Romney even passed on writing a concession speech, at least before the crotchety assignment-desk known as “reality” finally weighed in.

Less well-known, however, are the details of the polls that led Romney to believe he was so close to the presidency. Which other swing states did Romney believe he was leading in, and by how much? What did they tell him about where to spend his final hours of campaigning? Why was his team so sanguine about its own polling, even though it often parted company with the publicly available data? In an exclusive to The New Republic, a Romney aide has provided the campaign’s final internal polling numbers for six key states…

The numbers include internal polls conducted on Saturday, November 3, and Sunday, November 4, for Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Iowa, Colorado, and New Hampshire. According to Newhouse, the campaign polled daily, then combined the results into two-day averages.

In the polling data provided to TNR by Mitt Romney’s chief internal pollster Neil Newhouse, Romney has a 2.5 point lead on President Barack Obama in Colorado over the weekend before Election Day. As you know, the President won Colorado by almost 5.5 points. The range of explanations offered by Newhouse in this story vary from Latino voters (which while significant, don’t fully cover the spread), over-reliance on self-identified “highly likely voters,” and the perils of polling on a Sunday. Each one of these, the story goes, unintentionally helped contribute to the false sense of optimism projected by the GOP going into Election Day.

This story again answers the question of whether the Romney campaign was convinced it was going to win, or whether there was a more complicated process of spin for the base that the higher levels of the campaign knew wasn’t true. Right to the very top, this was a campaign that did believe victory was imminent, and was genuinely surprised when it failed to materialize.

What this story doesn’t seem to adequately capture, beyond the raw numbers of how wrong they were, is the depth of the bubble–with the exception of Gallup and a few clearly GOP-skewed pollsters, Obama’s win in Colorado was accurately forecast in several pre-election polls.

It’s also worth noting, as Hughes did, that longtime local GOP operative Rich Beeson was Romney’s political director. Beeson’s willing participation in the groupthink and flawed assumptions that led the Romney campaign to believe Colorado was in their column shows the extent of the break with a reality they should have seen coming at them like a Mack truck.

Answer: a perhaps unprecedented extent.

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24 thoughts on “Colorado Internal Polls Reveal Why Romney Never Saw It Coming”

  1. true group think belief and not just spin to pump up the base turn out. Here’s a really fun explanation for why Karl Rove, in particular, was so adamant that Ohio couldn’t possibly have gone to Obama. No proof yet that it’s true but it’s certainly a not utterly impossible and completely delicious explanation for the look on his face when Fox called Ohio…

    Anonymous Claims It Stopped Karl Rove From Hacking The Election By Hacking ORCA, We Think

    http://wonkette.com/489966/ano…

  2. I’m still having a tough time believing that it was just that their polling was so flawed. If it was so much about polling, I would expect that we would hear much more stories of heads rolling among those who did the polling, analyzed the polling, or hired the pollsters. And I’m hearing little if anything about that.

    When I was a freshman in college, my fellow students were just certain that Mondale/Ferraro were going to win. For a bunch of starry eyed freshman to be so wrong is one thing. For a group of professional pollsters and political analysts to be so wrong is what gets me my tinfoil hat. I just have to figure that something else was in play. (The Rove manipulations referenced above, a greater faith in voter suppression tactics radically changing the universe of likely voters that the pollsters were told to consider.) I, for one, was confident of the polls that I was reading but wondered if there was going to be a significant impact due to voter suppression in places like Ohio and Florida to have an impact. Remember, it was a PA elected (SOS?) who said that they would deliver PA to Romney with their voter ID laws. To say something that bold in public, you either truly believe that tens if not hundreds of thousands of voters vote illegally or you feel confident that the ID laws are going to significantly impact legal voters who tend to vote D.

  4. Part of me wonders if the Republican Party has gone so far around the bend that they believed the “unskewing” phenomenon and applied it to their internal polls.

    Any claim that it was Latinos, or Sundays, or Likely Voters fails to really account for the differences; those excuses are at best attempts to get out from the head-rolling exercise that Todd notes.

    There’s something deeper going on, and it’s either a visible result of the GOP Alternate Reality Field, or a sign that Republicans really did think they were going to be better are suppressing the vote.

  5. The aggregated estimate by Nate Silver, which averaged multiple polls and made some efforts to control for historic polling biases was off by about three points.

    So, about 3 of the eight points by which Romney’s poll was off is an industry-wide problem not specific to any particular polling operation and the other 5 of the eight points by which it was off was some combination of random sampling error and Romney’s internal polling operation’s bias.  Given the widespread bias in many swing states, Romney’s internal polling bias was probably at least 3-4 percentage poiints, which is so much that it makes that data nearly worthless except to show trendlines.

  6. Let’s all just remember that the exact thing happened 2 years ago. Buck’s people genuinely thought they were going to win and their polls, as I recall, showed that. Bennet’s people (the same people as this time around) had numbers that showed it close, and that were – ultimately – dead on.  

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