The Biggest Republican Miscalculations Of 2012

1. Romney can still win.



Karl Rove didn’t just predict Romney would win beforehand; he actually insisted that Romney still may win Ohio after Fox News called Ohio for Obama. Fox host Megyn Kelly even replied, “Is this the math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better?”


2. Romney would win in an ‘unskewed’ landslide.

Claiming that the polls finding Obama in the lead before the election had a “liberal bias,” Dean Chambers founded UnskewedPolls.com, a Republican alternate universe. UnskewedPolls.com predicted Romney would win 275 electoral votes. After the election, Chambers admitted he was wrong and started another site accusing Obama of winning with voter fraud.


3. Latinos would vote for Romney.

 

The Romney campaign said its goal was to win at least 38 percent of Latino voters, but after Mitt Romney staked out the most extreme immigration stances — and Ann Romney claimed Latino voters needed to get past “their biases” — he won less than a quarter of the Latino vote.

  
4. Marriage equality would be defeated.

 

Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, told SiriusXM host Michelangelo Signorile, that marriage equality opponents would prevail on ballot referenda Maine, Maryland, Washington and Minnesota, boasting “I think we’re going to win all four. But say we were to lose one — but still, we lost [just] one… Anyone who looks as an objective observer will still be able to say, if we lose one state, the record still shows that [we’ve] won, whatever, 35 out of 36.” The pro-marriage-equality side prevailed in all four states.


5. Obama juiced the jobs numbers.

 

After a significant drop in unemployment, conservatives on Twitter, led by former General Electrics CEO Jack Welch, claimed the numbers were fabricated by the Obama administration. Needless to say, they weren’t, and Welch ended up stepping down — briefly — from his job at Forbes.