Willard Actually Thought He Would Win

I have to admit this surprises me a little bit. It seems that Willard Mitt Romney went into election night supremely confident that he had won the presidency. And he wasn't the only one. His veep nominee and his entire campaign staff were also convinced he had won. They even got a permit and bought fireworks for a big show over Boston Harbor as soon as the networks announced he had won. Here's some of the comments his aides gave to CBS News:

"We went into the evening confident we had a good path to victory," said one senior adviser. "I don't think there was one person who saw this coming."

"There's nothing worse than when you think you're going to win, and you don't," said another adviser. "It was like a sucker punch."

"He was shellshocked," one adviser said of Romney.

Obviously, Willard and his people were living in a dream world of their own construction. Those of us in the real world knew that his momentum had stopped two or three weeks before the election, and the president had the "big mo" going into election day. At best it was going to be a smashing Obama victory (which it was), and at worst it would be a nail-biter. But only those living in the alternate reality of Fox News could believe Willard had it in the bag.

Compare this to 2008. McCain knew he would probably lose. He and his aides prayed that the polls were wrong and a miracle would happen, but they generally live in the real world (except for his veep nominee) and they weren't shocked at how things turned out -- disappointed, but not shocked.

How could Willard think he had the election won? How could he have convinced himself of that in light of all the evidence there was to dispute it? Here's how CBS News describes the way Willard's campaign was able to delude themselves:

Romney and his campaign had gone into the evening confident they had a good path to victory, for emotional and intellectual reasons. The huge and enthusiastic crowds in swing state after swing state in recent weeks - not only for Romney but also for Paul Ryan - bolstered what they believed intellectually: that Obama would not get the kind of turnout he had in 2008.

They thought intensity and enthusiasm were on their side this time - poll after poll showed Republicans were more motivated to vote than Democrats - and that would translate into votes for Romney.

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.

Those 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.

Those assessments were wrong.

They made three key miscalculations, in part because this race bucked historical trends:

1. They misread turnout. They expected it to be between 2004 and 2008 levels, with a plus-2 or plus-3 Democratic electorate, instead of plus-7 as it was in 2008. Their assumptions were wrong on both sides: The president's base turned out and Romney's did not. More African-Americans voted in Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida than in 2008. And fewer Republicans did: Romney got just over 2 million fewer votes than John McCain.

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.

3. Undecided voters. The perception is they always break for the challenger, since people know the incumbent and would have decided already if they were backing him. Romney was counting on that trend to continue. Instead, exit polls show Mr. Obama won among people who made up their minds on Election Day and in the few days before the election. So maybe Romney, after running for six years, was in the same position as the incumbent.

The campaign before the election had expressed confidence in its calculations, and insisted the Obama campaign, with its own confidence and a completely different analysis, was wrong. In the end, it the other way around.