and at the end of the day they went with the liberal guy because they didn t think some of them didn t show. they thought the liberal guy understood them more, and it s all because the obama campaign and the democratic super pacs defined romney from the get-go, and the people in ohio just thought that romney did not understand their lives, their problems well, that s true. neil newhouse is a smart pollster. he just did not have the size of the electorate right. if the electorate predicted you say they re susan is right. they would have won but they did not expect the black do you have any history of people, white men, regular voters, not voting? i don t know of when they don t vote. they seem they always vote. he s talking about them not showing up. did they fill their ballots up but not for president? did they stay at home? doesn t everybody want to vote? i m stunned by well, i don t know. maybe there was an issue here with, you know, as jeff was saying,
going to exhume tonight the guts of the thinking that went on and went so wrong. tonight, we get what we only guessed at, the results of which played out in the numbers of election night. the nasty, anti-immigrant politics, the attitude toward that 47%, the failure to turn out the white male vote, the reason romney picked ryan, and the wild prelude to the clint eastwood performance. tonight right here on hardball, the dark aroma of what lies now beneath the dirt so we can understand what it looks like to think and feel your way into an historic disaster. with me are jeff zeleny with the new york times and susan milligan who is contributing editor at u.s. news & world report. you laugh. it s not funny. you both attended that harvard institute of policy forum. last week with top advisers from both the obama and romney campaigns. they just released, by the way, tonight, we have the audio recordings of that not filmed event. we have a real autopsy of what went on behind the scenes du
we support nearly 250,000 jobs and invest more here than anywhere else. we re working to fuel america for generations to come. our commitment has never been stronger. political campaigns are always competing to figure out the best ways to use social media. as the romney campaign learned, not all publicity is good publicity. yahoo! announced its top search terms of the year, and three of the top ten came from the romney campaign. good news? not really. coming in at nine, etch-a-sketch. romney adviser eric fehrnstrom s famous prediction he would shift sharply to the middle in the general election and did. number eight, eastwooding. inspired by clint eastwood s bizarre convention performance. talking to that empty chair. number two yahoo! meme, binders full of women. that came out of the second debate as romney clumsily explained how he searched for women when he was governor of
think governor perry was badly hurt. in retrospect, i believe that we could have probably just beaten governor perry with the social security hit. boy, talk about a ruthless comment by a cynic talking there saying we didn t have to go in anti-immigrant tactically. we could have beaten him on his stupid comment on social security. the whole thing about immigration, self-deportation, all the rotten hard right position they took was just a tactic, and they could have avoided it. that s his entire assessment. i don t think these people deserve to win elections. i think matt rhoades was saying something that we have all believed that romney is pretending to be anti-immigrant. i don t know about that but not necessarily that he why did he he was worried about the other opponents in this primary campaign. michele bachmann was still in the race. they were really worried about governor perry. what this forum is interesting in showing when governor perry got into the race, thei
wound and they had to sort of suffer through it. yeah. well, what you can t hear on the tape is when he said that was not a high moment for us, and everybody laughed in the room. you can t hear that on the tape. but they didn t even in this event sort of apologize for the substance of that. it was just an acknowledgment it did do them damage. the obama people said it certainly helped them, but they also didn t think that that rush that they had in the polls right after that was really real. i mean, that was another thing that was very different between the two campaigns. i feel the obama people were much more realistic about the numbers, what the numbers really were, as compared to the romney campaign. what do you make of that, the fact again, we see the pattern of tactical answers to what seem to be terrible statements about half the country, 47%, not being this guy s responsibility. right. i mean, i think in fairness these questions were tactical questions. this was a forum a