Anyone watching the polls knew that Obama was going to win this election. Andrew S. Tanenbaum's Electoral-vote.com and Nate Silver's Five-Thirty-Eight were on the mark, give or take a handful of points. How the hell did the GOP convince themselves this was a toss-up, or expect a Romney landslide? In These Times looks at The GOP’s Year of Magical Thinking
What follows is a sampling of commentary on the presidential race from conservative pundits. The majority of the items were among the most-read pieces on the conservative-leaning RealClearPolitics website, so they hardly represent fringe thinking. In fact, they were the Right’s mainstream thinking about the election. And that thinking was firmly and consistently at odds with the empirical evidence also available at the RCP site.
Now, it needs to be said that magical thinking and a willingness to skip empirical evidence isn't limited to the GOP. For example, many of my liberal friends are equally disinclined to consider the facts when it comes to firearms politics, and several are about willing to hang me for daring to point out Obama's drone terrorism and civil liberties violations. But as it happens, the conservative reality distortion field has been much more at odds with actual reality than the liberal one for a number of years now, and this year's election had been its crowning moment. Will it finally break? Or will the Republican leadership and pundits give up entirely on trying to maintain a connection with reality? We shall see.