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Friday, November 30, 2012

2012 How Wrong Were Mitt Romney's Internal Polls?

Posted by Paul Constant on Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 11:04 AM

The New Republic has a look at Mitt Romney's internal polls, and they're hilariously bad.

The first thing you notice is that New Hampshire and Colorado are pretty far off the mark. In New Hampshire, the final internal polling average has Romney up 3.5 points, whereas he lost by 5.6. In Colorado, the final internal polling average has Romney up 2.5 points; he lost by 5.4. “I’m not sure what the answer is,” Newhouse told me, explaining that his polls were a lot more accurate in most of the other swing states. “The only ones we had that really seemed to be off were Colorado—a state that even Obama’s people tweeted they thought it was going to be one of their closest states—and the New Hampshire numbers, which seemed to bounce a lot during the campaign.”

Huh. I wonder where they went wrong?

Broadly speaking, the people who showed up to vote on November 6 were younger and less white than Team Romney anticipated, and far more Democratic as a result. “The Colorado Latino vote was extraordinarily challenging,” Newhouse told me. “As it was in Florida.”

Oh, yeah. That. Well! Who could've predicted?

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I think both the Dems and the Repubs are kinda blowing it on this whole demographics thing. This wasn't so much "white males v. everyone else" — hell, 36% of white males voted for Obama. This was more like "your platform and your candidate suck donkey dick, and I just can't bring myself to vote for it, no matter how much I hold my nose."

Posted by Fifty-Two-Eighty

on November 30, 2012 at 11:18 AM

We should make note of where our numbers lie and act appropriately. If we continue to stand for the issues that younger voters have made their own and fight for them in government, than we continue to win. The narrow interest of the primarily southern, older, white males will be all the Republicans have. And their prejudices preclude them from widening those interests to include "others".

Posted by Pope Peabrain on November 30, 2012 at 11:34 AM

Oh my gosh! Young people and brown people vote! What is to be done?!

Posted by Clayton on November 30, 2012 at 11:49 AM

Another take on this:

It's quite possible that quarter-of-a-billionaire Mitt Romney is accustomed to having his lackeys tell him what he wants to hear.

And that his lackeys -- in this case, his pollsters -- oblige.

How'd that work out for you, Willard?

Posted by judybrowni on November 30, 2012 at 11:58 AM

And those uppity single women vote, too.

Their own minds.

Heavens to Betsy!

Posted by judybrowni on November 30, 2012 at 11:59 AM

It the eternal problem of echo chamber ideologues - left or right. They steadfastly ignore the reality that there actually IS such a thing as objective fact.

Posted by tkc on November 30, 2012 at 12:01 PM

"Well geez, over half the people working on the campaign said they'd vote for him. I don't get what happened."

Posted by Dougsf on November 30, 2012 at 12:28 PM

I'd like to know how the polls were conducted. Landline phone calls? Snail mail? Stopping people in shopping malls?

Bad methodology can explain a lot.

Posted by Urgutha Forka on November 30, 2012 at 1:16 PM