Until Election Day, there was a sense that victory was within Mitt Romney's reach. Romneyworld reckoning begins

BOSTON — Advisers to Mitt Romney insisted Wednesday that they were surprised by the scale of their loss to President Barack Obama, while big-time GOP donors griped about the campaign’s unflinching confidence in the final stretch.

As results began to stream in Tuesday night, prominent Romney supporters in Boston tried to stay positive, reassuring themselves that there was still a path to the White House. But dejection quickly turned to anger a day after an Electoral College rout that shocked many who had heard self-assured projections about voter enthusiasm and turnout in private conference calls and meetings in the campaign’s final stretch.


“They ran a 20th-century campaign in the 21st century,” said one Romney bundler, frustrated that the campaign made assumptions about the youth vote and voter intensity that didn’t pan out. “The anger is that they were entrusted to do certain things. It’s not like they were paid a $5,000 retainer to get a few dozen articles in an inside-the-Beltway paper. This is the major leagues.”

Another Republican outside the Romney campaign but privy to its thinking described the defeat as a complete pummeling, with Senate losses adding salt to the wound.

Romney supporters point to a series of brash statements made by advisers that seem out of touch with reality in retrospect. Inside-the-Beltway, Republicans trained their fire on senior Romney advisers like Ed Gillespie and political director Rich Beeson for appearances on last weekend’s Sunday shows. Gillespie said the electoral map was expanding, and Beeson predicted a 300 electoral vote win for Romney.

“There were a lot of Republicans who were on calls that the campaign was having led to believe we had shots in Pennsylvania and Minnesota,” one Republican operative supporting Romney said. “I think Republicans are split right now between confused and shocked, and also I think they are wondering did the Romney campaign have numbers we didn’t have.”

In starker terms, the source questioned: “Was last week a head fake, or were they just not that smart?”

Multiple Romney sources buzzed about one number in particular: 15 percent. According to exit polls, that’s the share of African-Americans who voted in Ohio this year. In 2008, the black percentage of the electorate was 11 percent. In Virginia and Florida, exit polls showed the same share of African-Americans turned out as four years ago, something that GOP turnout models did not anticipate.

“We didn’t think they’d turn out more of their base vote than they did in 2008, but they smoked us,” said one Romney operative. “It’s unbelievable that they turned out more from the African-American community than in 2008. Somehow they got ’em to vote.”

African-Americans supported Obama nearly universally, but Obama still won Ohio only by 1.9 percent.

“We just didn’t see the enthusiasm with their base,” he added. “We had enthusiasm on our side. So we thought, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna win this.’ … We hit our numbers in rural areas. When Fox called it, we still thought we had a chance based on what we could figure was in and what was still out.”

On a rainy and dreary post-Election Day here, as Romney staffers turned in their BlackBerrys at campaign headquarters and huddled for a late-afternoon staff meeting, most were more focused on housekeeping than relitigating strategic decisions. They were disappointed but circumspect, although a more exhaustive review is planned in the next few days.

Inside tight-knit Romneyworld — where many of the GOP nominee’s senior aides have worked together since Romney’s time as Massachusetts governor — there was a sense Tuesday that the White House was within reach. Over the past few weeks, especially after Romney’s strong Denver debate performance, some staffers were openly speculating about jobs they might nab in a Romney administration and discussed the shape of the transition effort. By Wednesday, many were looking for work but taking the long view.

At the Boston convention center where Romney conceded in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Romney’s high command — including Eric Fehrnstrom and Kevin Madden — looked glum. Hugs and handshakes were exchanged after Romney spoke for five minutes and then stood on stage with his family and his running mate, Paul Ryan.

After getting some sleep, a senior campaign official praised the skill of his opponents in Chicago, saying Obama’s team ran a “technically proficient campaign.”

“People really did think we were going to win,” he said. “I thought going into yesterday that we could and would win. You’ve got to give them a lot of credit: They changed the electorate.”

Romney bundlers and mega-donors were optimistic Tuesday afternoon as they mingled in the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel lobby, picking up their donor packets and prepping for a private party before what they believed would be a Romney victory.

Romney’s team believed that it would be hard to lose if they won independents, but it happened. They said they thought they could perform as well with men as Obama did with women, but they didn’t. They thought there would be fewer young voters in 2008, but turnout was roughly on par.

Obama campaign officials noted Wednesday that they had years to build up a field operation that was often not visible to the other side. The director of Obama outreach to African-Americans in Ohio oversaw a barber shop and beauty salon program that helped register new voters and distribute literature. A Congregations Captains Program helped the campaign arm supporters in traditionally African-American congregations with what they needed to mobilize other parishioners.

“Obviously, there was still room to grow,” said an Obama campaign official. “We didn’t reach 100 percent capacity in 2008.”

Internally, Hurricane Sandy received a share of blame. The campaign’s messaging mavens say they lost several key days where they couldn’t roll out attacks because of the storm. Worse, Romney had been attacking Obama for being small — and his response to the storm made him look big. A key component of Romney’s closing argument was that Obama could not work across the aisle, a campaign official said, but then the president wandered around New Jersey with GOP Gov. Chris Christie.

“No one here is expressing any regret,” an adviser said. “It’s the nature of the game….This was not McCain ’08 … You have an organization with a few hundred people worth a billion dollars. There will be days with disagreement, no doubt … But there’s a sense of camaraderie.”

The candidate himself isn’t coming out unscathed. Given his background at Bain Capital and reputation as a details and data-driven employer and candidate, many Republicans are also questioning whether Romney was personally engaged enough in key decisions.

Meanwhile, the bundlers and mega-donors who put their reputations on the line — helping raise more than $1 billion for the Romney operation — continued to praise the finance team as first class. But there is little love lost among them for pollster Neil Newhouse and chief strategist and ad maker Stuart Stevens.

Simply put — many GOP-ers said that when the dust settles, the verdict will be this was an election that Romney should have won.

Fred Malek, who chaired Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) 2008 presidential bid, said that Romney and his campaign team ran a good race, but that in the final weeks all of the breaks were in Obama’s favor — from the positive jobs reports to the storm interrupting Romney’s momentum coming out of the debate.

“People are going to carp, but many of us are in this for the long term, and probably don’t like to lose. It’s democracy, and if we want to spend time recriminating or criticizing or going after what could have been, that’s not healthy, it’s not going to help,” he said. “These things ebb and flow a bit, it just happened to ebb at the wrong time for us.”

Perhaps the Romney insiders in Boston drank a little too much of their own Kool-Aid. Huge crowds are common for both sides in a campaign’s closing days. Romney himself was moved by an unplanned massing of a thousand well-wishers who waited for him at the airport in Pittsburgh Tuesday afternoon.

“You know intellectually I’ve felt we’re going to win this and have felt that for some time, but emotionally just getting off the plane and seeing those people standing there — we didn’t tell them we were coming, we didn’t notify them when we’d arrive, just seeing people there cheering as they were — connected emotionally with me,” he told reporters on the flight from Pittsburgh to Boston before polls closed. “I not only think we’re going to win intellectually, I feel it as well.”

Romney said on that flight that he has no regrets.

“I feel we have put it all on the field,” he said. “We left nothing in the locker room. We fought to the very end.”