Delusional Numbers

How do campaigns turn out to be complete disasters without the loser foreseeing it ahead of time? How did Romney followers swear that Obama reaching over 330 electoral votes was impossible let alone even winning 270? How did Scott Walker utterly destroy the Democrats recall when Democrats proclaimed that the momentum and the public was on their side?

Nate Silver has some answers on the delusional numbers political campaigns tell themselves, with emphasis on the Romney campaigns internal polls they based their strategies off of.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes...y-be-to-blame/

The key point for future GOP candidates?

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campaigns would be wise not to have their pollsters serve as public spokesmen or spin doctors for the campaign. Campaigns have other personnel who specialize in those tasks.
The role of the pollster should be just the opposite of this, in fact: to provide a reality check such that the campaign does not begin to believe its own spin.

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Americans appear to like winners. To ever entertain anything less that total victory will cause persons to leave from the outset.

In the UK, to state one is rich or sucessful in a campaign is equally toxic - especially if Tory.

~:smoking:

Bill Maher put his finger on it for me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7WYtsWtHlk

cognitive dissonance is a powerful force, you can see it in religion, but to see it so clearly in politics is more rare.
facts that go against the "truth" get absorbed nonetheless and reworked to fit into the "truth"
it's funny to see them smack against the wall of reality though.

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Originally Posted by gaelic cowboy

Bill Maher put his finger on it for me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7WYtsWtHlk

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We really need better math and statistics education all over the world...

When you have two teams striving to win and stating that they will do so. Well outside of a draw, one of the teams has to be wrong.

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Originally Posted by Papewaio

When you have two teams striving to win and stating that they will do so. Well outside of a draw, one of the teams has to be wrong.

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That's not the problem. Of course claiming to win is okay but not being able to interpret statistics as a campaign manager? That's terrible.

For what it's worth: "49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn't exist anymore."

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Originally Posted by Kival

That's not the problem. Of course claiming to win is okay but not being able to interpret statistics as a campaign manager? That's terrible.

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Why would the GOP need statistics. That is for god less homosexuals and other deviants. :smoking:

All it requires is outsourcing without tender to your buddies and she will be right. None of this internal IT resourcing using open source shennigans and highly scalable cloud compute.

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Originally Posted by Lemur

For what it's worth: "49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn't exist anymore."

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I also heard a lot of blaming Gov Christie, as if New Jersey would have changed anything.

The DuffelBlog did a satirical piece on how a few thousand delayed absentee votes would have given Romney the election, and for its first few hours of publication it showed at the top of google searches and was carried by several conservative bloggers and quite a few facebookers before people pointed out that it was a joke and an impossibility, at which point the parties deleted the references to the "story"