I’m still having trouble wholeheartedly accepting the idea that the Romney campaign believed they were going to win and were totally shocked when they didn’t. I still think they told a lot of lies to their donors and that they are kind of locked into a narrative that they were sincere in their confidence. When I saw that they had leaked some of their battleground polls from the last weekend of the campaign, it didn’t convince me otherwise, since those polls still showed Obama on track to win.
But, if there is any real evidence that Romney personally thought he had the election in the bag, it has to be his performance in the last two debates. Romney’s performance in the last debate, in particular, seemed to me to indicate that he thought he was in the lead and just needed to make no gaffes and he would win. The subject of the last debate was foreign policy, and Romney went out of his way to agree with the president’s policies even in areas where he had spent more than a year being a strident critic. I found his performance inexplicable at the time. Some analysts thought he was trying to move to the middle, but I felt like he was pulling his punches. He seemed like a boxer who knows he is ahead on the judges’ cards and just wanted to avoid a 12th round knockout.
I still don’t know if Romney really thought he was going to win, but he acted like it in the last debate. I have yet to see any rationale for him feeling that way, however.
