Campaign post-mortem: the Romney camp's internal polls

As Republicans seek to understand the Romney campaign's failure to win this year's presidential election, it is critical to explore not only the strategic errors the campaign made but also the tactical ones as the election went into the home stretch.  At the core of those tactical failures was Romney's reliance on polling data that proved to be catastrophically off the mark.  Over at The New Republic Noam Schrieber has an article posted on the Romney camp's internal polling data, the data that lead the campaign to become overconfident in the face of the significant advantages that the Obama campaign had going into Election Day. The article is well-worth a read -- although it is also full of some ideological posturing that should be discounted by any serious reader.

Updates:

• Over at the Legal Insurrection blog, law professor William A. Jacobson has some sage words regarding the treatment of GOP polling efforts during the last election:  Wishful thinking on Republican wishful thinking. Jacobson rightly notes that problems with Republican polls doesn't necessarily mean that people were affirmatively dishonest, rather they simply were mistaken -- and Republicans shouldn't fall into the trap of attacking each other based on ideas pushed by media commentators who are not known to be friends of the either the Republican Party or the conservative movement:

We may never fully understand what went wrong with the Republican internal polling, but errors in modeling judgment seem to be the emerging issue. Don’t jump to extrapolate that into dishonesty unless you have the evidence to prove it. 

An internal war among Republican circles may be warranted, but it should be based on fact, not memes pushed by the anti-Republican media. 

• David Frum wonders just how distorted the Romney campaign's information really was in this post over at his blog at The Daily Beast.  Frum suggests that it is likely that Romney was informed of polling information that was considerably more pessimistic about his likely chances of victory.