Mitt Romney Reportedly Shellshocked On Election Night

Mitt Romney went into election night believing that he was leading over Barack Obama in polling, but the GOP candidate grew quickly shellshocked to find out just how thoroughly President Obama was beating him.

Advisers to Mitt Romney have spoken about the chaos of Election Night, one in which Romney was confident he would win. Polling in the weeks leading up to the election had shown Barack Obama withstanding Mitt Romney’s run after his win in the first debate and strengthening his position in the final days, but many in Romney’s campaign turned a blind eye.

After Ohio went for Barack Obama, a state absolutely necessary for Romney to have any chance of winning the election, a wave of shock set over the campaign, CBS reports.

“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.”

Campaign members could not believe they were wrong, but as The Huffington Post reports, they had willfully ignored polling showing Obama in the lead. Instead they preferred to see “unskewed” polls that shifted demographics to what they believed the electorate would look like.

Mitt Romney and these advisers quickly learned they were wrong, CBS reports:

“They just couldn’t believe they had been so wrong. And maybe they weren’t: There was Karl Rove on Fox saying Ohio wasn’t settled, so campaign aides decided to wait. They didn’t want to have to withdraw their concession, like Al Gore did in 2000, and they thought maybe the suburbs of Columbus and Cincinnati, which hadn’t been reported, could make a difference.

“But then came Colorado for the president and Florida also was looking tougher than anyone had imagined.”

At that point advisers looked to see what pathway they had to winning the election, and realized there was none.

“He was shellshocked,” one adviser told CBS News.

Romney fended off campaign members who wanted to put off conceding, and made a stoic phone call to congratulate Barack Obama.

The report gives one more detail to show how much Mitt Romney was shellshocked by the news — he had never even bothered to write a concession speech.