Here are two interesting selections from Jan Crawford's rather amazing autopsy of the Romney campaign. First the expectations:



They all were thrust on that stage without understanding what had just happened. "He was shellshocked," one adviser said of Romney.

And then the reasons for the expectations:


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.

You heard a similar line of argument from people like Dean Chambers at UnskewedPolls. But I generally thought that the actual Republican numbers people, and certainly the numbers people in the GOP campaign, were sharper than this. If I were Mitt Romney I would much rather spend the days leading up to the election preparing myself for a punch, then to have myself "sucker-punched" by reality. In other words, it wouldn't be in my interest to have people around me believe the hype. On the contrary, I'd be really angry if I found out they had. Even buying the argument that the people behind the polling are somehow biased, how do you reconcile that with the fact that polls actually predicted Bush's win in 2004? 
On some level it's hard to not conclude that the Romney campaign, and Republicans on a whole, were not simply ill-served by their media, and their experts, but they themselves were actually requesting ill service. 

Ideology can place blinders on everyone, of course--I don't know how many liberal friends I've tried to talk out of their affinity for rent control--but the incentives for misleading one's audience are not evenly distributed across the left-leaning and right-leaning media. The Romney surge after the first debate didn't translate to a widespread liberal belief about systemic bias among polling firms, for example.



The best way to understand the difference between liberal and conservative media and expertise is to think about the response, within  Obama's campaign and within liberal media, to his first debate performance. There certainly were liberals who thought he actually hadn't done that bad, and that the press had given him a raw deal. But there were others who thought he'd performed poorly. And the Obama campaign, itself, thought he'd performed poorly. My point here is there was debate, a fight, within liberal circles which didn't devolve into indictments of DINOs. There was no attempt to "unskew" reality. 

There will always a market in self-delusion, and in a political movement, there will always be people who want to invest. But a political leadership investing in the business of "unskewing" is a school of oncology investing in the business of faith-healing.
