While some have written about ambivalence among GOP donors in general [in the Massachusetts Senate special election], I think the point that is being missed is that these folks were told and really believed that Romney could and would win. They heard it from the campaign, the party committees, the superpacs and from Fox. They don't know who to believe now. The GOP has to re-earn their donors trust, as does Fox. I can't tell you how many Republican House members have told me that they had no idea that Romney wasn't going to win, all the way to Election Day.

Dave Weigel , quoting an email from elections handicapper Charlie Cook:Being reality-based and relying on cold hard data, we knew fairly well what November would deliver. There were some surprises, like winning the North Dakota and Indiana Senate races, but even those shouldn't have been surprising had we believed the polling.

So it's hard to truly fathom just how deluded the wingers were last election. Even Mitt Romney's pollsters "unskewed" their data, convincing their entire operation from top to bottom that they were en route to their big victory.

But gun-shy Republican donors are now supposedly afraid to commit to electoral efforts because they no longer know who to believe. These people didn't make their millions by pissing away their money on bad investments, and the GOP is currently a terrible investment. Will they really pull back from their big-money efforts to buy our democracy? Kind of hard to see them doing that, but who knows.

What I do know is that no one in the conservative world is working to "rebuild trust", not when serious conservatives are pushing nonsense like "the IRS won the election for Obama", or that 2012 proved that the American people prefer Republicans. Those are actual arguments, really!

This is a political movement that depends on partisan media to create an alternate reality. They aren't about to take off those rose-tinted glasses. It's simply more comforting to live inside their safe, warm, little bubble, even if the occasional burst of reality (e.g. 2012 election night) causes them great pain.