Well, no. Feed those numbers into an electoral vote calculator. If you give Romney NC, FL, VA, NH, IA, OH, and CO (even though no lead for Colorado was specifically cited), that gets him up to 285. Give him Ohio but not Colorado, he still wins with 276. Give him Colorado but not Ohio, though, and he only gets to 267. The entire house of cards is premised upon winning Ohio, a state where he had only a one-point lead. That could be compensated for by breaking the tie in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, though. So, in other words, the election came down to essentially winning one out of several coin flips, presuming everything else went as planned. It would appear to give him likelier-than-not odds, but not the kind of advantage where a reasonably informed person would be "shellshocked" for it not to happen -- and that's without even taking into consideration that virtually everyone else in the polling business was describing those coins as being weighted against him.

And then something else happened... on Tuesday morning, some other anonymous Romney staffer reached out to Politico's Glenn Thrush and walked the leak back. Thrush's two tweets on the matter read:



The Romney campaign now saying internals attributed to their pollster Neil Newhouse showing Mitt up in Ohio, tied in WI, PA "are incorrect"

Romney spox, just now in an email: "The numbers attributed to [Neil Newhouse] are incorrect, hence, not his."

They didn't walk back the leak in order to substitute better polls -- better than the previous ones which indicated only a coin-flip chance of winning -- which is what a confident campaign would do. They simply withdrew the polls. Unless the subsequent walkback was a very strange way of messing with our heads, though, it was an open admission that they didn't have any actual polling that optimistic. The leaked polls had been a mirage, probably whipped up for a last-minute boost of reassurance to get their likely voters to the polls the next day. And since the alleged polls weren't that optimistic in the first place -- merely indicating that Romney had a puncher's chance in Ohio and a potential alternate route through Wisconsin -- to those capable of reading between the lines, the walkback seemed like a confession that they got nothin', and were about to lose.

In addition, factor in the stories that emerged on Thursday about the Romney GOTV operation, based around linking volunteers' smartphones with a centralized computer. Code-named ORCA, it spent most of Thursday afternoon stuck on the beach, having crashed repeatedly. Politico's Alex Burns and Maggie Haberman, in describing the level of fail, cited multiple people calling it "flying blind." Even if you were feeling confident going into Tuesday thanks to your polls, you would not feel confident coming out of Tuesday while having no idea how your GOTV operation performed -- any more than a pilot would feel confident landing his plane with a shorted-out instrument panel despite having had a perfectly level flight.

So why on earth would Team Romney, in CYA-mode following the election, start flogging the story to credulous media enablers that they were "shellshocked" by the results? It boils down to two alternatives for Romney's camp, neither of them good, both of which would be the basis for claims of political malpractice. Option A: admit that you were operating in a bubble, that your pollsters were making faulty assumptions, and that despite the fact that your pollsters were coming up with numbers that didn't look like anyone else's, you were so reliant on gut feelings about voter enthusiasm that you didn't bother to seek a second opinion. (That's the CBS article, in a nutshell.)

Or Option B: admit that your data looked much like everyone else's and that you're smart enough to know that all along that you were losing, but that the rules of the game prevented you from publicly admitting that. That's partially because, via the 'bandwagon effect,' it might depress turnout, but mostly because it would depress contributions from big money donors who don't want to waste their money -- thus becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy because you then wouldn't have the money you'd need to even have a shot at winning.

Team Romney might be falling on its sword here and choosing Option A -- even though it has the effect of demolishing what remained of his pragmatic numbers-driven wonk brand, making him look like a self-absorbed fool selectively listening only to yes men -- because Option B would be even more unthinkable, in terms of Republican hopes for future races.

Do you think that the Sheldon Adelsons of the world would be willing to open up their checkbooks for future races, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, when they find out that they've simply been lied to about Republican chances in order to keep the dollars flowing? Remember, these are guys who've been promised that they were getting the unvarnished truth about the campaign -- the platinum-club insider access -- and now they're finding out that they're getting grifted, just as standard campaign operating practice. (As you no doubt know, Karl Rove is having parallel problems with his American Crossroads donors.)

As much as we'd like to think so, Mitt Romney isn't dumb, and he's a good Republican soldier. He isn't running for anything else, so he can afford to feign ignorance and act like this was a one-time convergence of bad polling and self-delusion on his part. It's better for the overall Republican brand for Romney to briefly make himself look ridiculous one last time, than to admit to the billionaire donor class that they just threw hundreds of millions of dollars down a rathole while being kept in the dark about their actual odds, and that it's just as likely to happen to them again in 2016.