It isn’t unusual for individuals, organizations, or even political parties to make mistakes, but it is unusual, certainly in Washington, to see anyone own up to them. What is truly extraordinary is for any person or group to conduct, release, and publicize an exhaustive research project detailing what went wrong and why. In the past three months, we have now seen two groups do just that.
First, the Republican National Committee, chaired by Reince Priebus, issued its “Growth and Opportunity Project,” essentially an autopsy of what went wrong for the GOP in the last election. … Now the Gallup Organization has released an executive summary of its own postmortem, which explains how its polling of likely voters ended up projecting a Mitt Romney win by 1 percentage point, 49 percent to 48 percent, in an election the Republican nominee ended up losing by almost 4 points (3.85 to be exact). [cont.]
Charlie Cook