Few Republicans anticipated the severe setbacks they experienced on Nov. 6. The GOP polling debacle

For Republicans, one of the worst parts of the GOP’s 2012 trouncing was that they didn’t see it coming.

Top party strategists and officials always knew there was a chance that President Barack Obama would get reelected, or that Republicans wouldn’t gain control of the Senate. But down to the final days of the national campaign, few anticipated the severe setbacks that Republicans experienced on Nov. 6.


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The reason: Across the party’s campaigns, committees and super PACs, internal polling gave an overly optimistic read on the electorate. The Romney campaign entered the last week of the election convinced that Colorado, Florida and Virginia were all but won, that the race in Ohio was neck and neck and that the Republican nominee had a legitimate shot in Pennsylvania.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee consistently had a more upbeat assessment of races in North Dakota and Montana, among others, than their Democratic counterparts. One GOP poll even showed Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock holding even with his opponent, even as public polls showed the embattled Republican hemorrhaging support. A Republican poll taken by Susquehanna Polling and Research showed Pennsylvania Senate candidate Tom Smith leading Democratic Sen. Bob Casey by 2 points a few weeks before the election; Casey won by 9 points.

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In the House, where the Republicans easily held on to their majority, the GOP still lost several races they expected to win. Utah Democrat Jim Matheson, who was down 15 points in a September poll by the firm Public Opinion Strategies, won by a single point. New York Rep. Tim Bishop, who trailed by 5 in a mid-October McLaughlin & Associates poll, won by just over 4 points. Another poll showed Massachusetts Rep. John Tierney trailing his GOP challenger by 17 points less than a month before the vote; Tierney won by a point. California GOP Rep. Mary Bono Mack, who led her opponent by double digits in a mid-October survey by consultant Arthur Finkelstein, lost by nearly 3 points. In Illinois’s 12th Congressional District and New York’s 18th Congressional District, private Republican polls left the party surprised by Democratic wins.

Now that that mountain of rosy polling data has come crashing down, Republicans are beginning to comb through the wreckage to try to figure out where they went wrong.

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“On the Republican side, this was the worst cycle ever for polling and there’s nothing that even comes close to it,” said GOP strategist Curt Anderson, who helms the media and polling firm OnMessage. “It was a colossal disaster and it wasn’t confined to the presidential campaign.”

Anderson said the proliferation of different groups — campaigns, outside spenders, etc. — polling the same states had made it exceptionally difficult to decode the political state of play and develop strategy accordingly.

“It seemed like you had people taking polls in different universes at the same time,” Anderson said. “Three, four points [of disagreement], that’s the margin of error, but I’m talking 10-, 15-point differences.”

It’s not as if the party is totally at a loss to explain where it went off course. Sources familiar with Romney’s polling say that it underestimated the Democrats’ 6-point voter identification edge, nationally, and put far too much stock in what one Republican operative called “false signs of Republican enthusiasm.” Multiple Republican pollsters also acknowledged that they misjudged how many young people and minorities would show up to vote.

“We need to rethink what voters we screen out, because clearly, we’re screening people out who are going to vote, and that’s manifestly affecting the numbers we’re looking at,” said NRSC executive director Rob Jesmer, who said the presidential race effectively swamped the GOP “likely voter” model. “It’s more apt in a presidential cycle, but we need to think about it.”

One GOP strategist involved in congressional races said the party’s pollsters need to gather “a conference of sorts between all of them to figure out what to do going forward,” pointing especially to the question of how to sample cell phone users who make up a growing share of the electorate.

Democrats had argued for months before the election that Republican polling was screening out voters who would ultimately turn up to support Obama. In fact, Obama advisers said, if you applied a tighter likely voter screen to Democratic polling — counting only the very likeliest voters as part of the electorate — you could come up with results similar to what the GOP was looking at.

By assuming that only the most enthusiastic voters would actually show up, Republicans greatly overestimated their national position. Operatives and activists rejected public polling data that showed substantially more voters identifying themselves as Democrats in states like Ohio and Virginia, giving Republicans an unwarranted sense of confidence that crumbled last Tuesday.

Democratic pollster Jef Pollock said it was incomprehensible to him how strategists on the other side so dramatically missed the mark in so many races — especially, he said, since “many of the polls that were in the public domain were proven to be right.”

“The unwritten truth is that there were a tremendous number of polls that were clearly incorrect. And unfortunately, many of those polls seemed to come in congressional and other races by Republican polling firms,” said Pollock, who heads the firm Global Strategy Group and polled for the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action. “I wish I could tell you how those numbers came to pass — numbers in congressional districts where they showed challengers ahead by 5 points and they ended up losing. Numbers in congressional districts where they showed challengers ahead by 5 points and Mitt Romney winning by double digits in a congressional district he ended up losing.”

“Those are unexplainable things,” Pollock continued. “Those are things I can’t explain and it’s not my job to explain.”

The crux of the party’s challenge in 2012, said Republican pollster David Winston, was figuring out whether the electorate would look more like the 2004 voting population, when Republicans and Democrats turned out in equal numbers, or the 2008 electorate, which was more Democratic than Republican by 7 points.

Winston questioned how rigorously some campaigns tested their assumptions about who would show up.

“The results fell within the 2004 result and the 2008 result, obviously closer to 2008,” said Winston, who advises the House GOP leaders — who fared well on Tuesday. “That was clearly how everybody had been describing what the potential range was. The question is, as people were assessing their individual campaigns, whether it be the presidential or down ballot for that, was how were they working through the potential scenarios as far as what could happen.”

One top GOP pollster expressed dismay at the ultimate composition of the electorate: “I had no expectation that Democratic advantage on party ID would be the same as it was in 2008. I thought there would be more Democrats than Republicans, but I didn’t think it would be equal to 2008.

“There were just too many damn Democrats,” the pollster said.

Romney pollster Neil Newhouse and other members of his firm, Public Opinion Strategies, declined or did not respond to requests for comment on the record. In addition to polls for Romney, one POS poll that drew notice late in the election showed former New Mexico Rep. Heather Wilson ahead by 1 in the state’s Senate race; she lost by 6 points.

Several Republicans pointed out that the surveys released for public consumption by GOP groups — or shared with Romney donors by Newhouse and others — may only have represented the most optimistic end of internal polling. It’s standard for campaigns to work through multiple potential turnout scenarios to make sure they’re not caught off guard on Election Day.

One top Republican operative said it was only a pretty upbeat data set that leaked out from Boston: “We kept getting, ‘Hey, this is what the Romney campaign internals are. And you think, ‘That’s a lot better than what I can find online.’ ”

Not all pollsters on the Republican side misjudged the electorate dramatically, but even survey-takers with a comparatively strong track record agreed that 2012 was a warning sign for the GOP.

Because the electorate is changing so rapidly, and because more and more voters are using cell phones that are harder to poll, both parties will have to adjust their models going into 2014 and beyond. But Democrats appear to have more or less nailed the racial composition and age distribution of the 2012 electorate — on the national level if not in every down-ballot race — while many Republicans did not.

Republican pollster Whit Ayres, of North Star Opinion Research, said that “one of the great success stories of this election from the Democratic perspective was that they were able to recreate the same kind of turnout among minorities and young people that occurred in 2008.”

But that doesn’t mean, he said, that so many Republicans should have been caught off guard.

“It is a mistake to place rosy assumptions on a likely electorate, that are at variance — and substantial variance — with recent history. The idea that you could arbitrarily say that we were going to have an electorate like 2004, with equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, is as fanciful as saying we’re going to have an electorate that has 12 points more Democrats than Republicans in it,” Ayres said.

Another Republican fumed at the party’s unwillingness to heed the Obama campaign’s publicly broadcast intentions to expand the 2012 electorate and keep minority and youth turnout high.

“For a year, they were saying in their YouTube videos and memos, ‘This is what we’re going to do, we’re going to turn all these people out,’ ” the Republican said. “They told us exactly what they were going to do and we just didn’t believe it.”

Other senior party strategists pushed back on the notion that Republican data was broadly based on flawed assumptions. If some presidential and Senate polling failed to predict the result accurately, that doesn’t necessarily signal a systemic problem with opinion research.

Besides, Tarrance Group pollster Ed Goeas argued, events do have a way of changing outcomes. So does a superior turnout operation of the kind Obama employed.

“Clearly, I think the one takeaway here is, all indications are we did a good job on the early vote but lost the vote on Election Day and that is not the trend in past campaigns,” said Goeas, whose firm worked for winning Senate campaigns in Nevada and Arizona. “It seems like [Democrats] got a little boost at the end.”

Pollster John McLaughlin — who produced Mourdock’s upbeat poll and worked for unsuccessful Senate candidates in Connecticut and Virginia — argued that Republican candidates may have experienced a drop-off in support at the end, thanks to Romney’s weakness at the top of the ticket.

“In the last week he was really collapsing, and on Election Day he really did collapse,” McLaughlin said. “The incumbents who had a longstanding image were able to withstand it. The challengers we had? It was like, ‘Oh, you’re with him.’ ”