Romney adviser calls GOP attacks on former nominee ‘stunning’

Dan Senor, a top adviser to the Mitt Romney campaign, said it was “stunning” how quickly the Republican establishment turned on the GOP challenger in the wake of his election loss.

“It is stunning,” Senor told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday.
 

“The Friday night before the election, we were in Cincinnati for this huge rally … Tens of thousands of people, you could feel the energy, a hundred top-tier Romney surrogates were at the event," Senor added. "I’m backstage with some of them, I won’t mention their names, but they’re talking about Romney like he’s Reagan. ‘His debate performances were the best performances of any Republican nominee in presidential history. He’s iconic.’ They were talking about him because they believed he was going to win in four or five days. And in fact, some of them were already talking to our transition [team] to position themselves for a Romney Cabinet.”
 
Senor declined to name anyone specifically, but indicated the offending parties had been high-profile Romney supporters up through Election Day.
 
“I won’t say who they are,” Senor said. “They know who they are. They were on television, it was unbelievable, it was five, six days later, absolutely eviscerating him.
 
“Many of these officials, I might add, chose to stay out of it, they chose not to run,” he continued. “And they chose to stay out of it because they believed this race was unwinnable.”
 
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) publicly rebuked Romney for comments he made in a phone call with donors after the election, when the GOP nominee said minorities flocked to the president because of free “gifts.” Others have piled on for a variety of issues, ranging from the campaign’s operations to Romney’s conservative bona fides.

Many have also questioned how the Romney campaign failed to see the overwhelming Electoral College defeat ahead of time, but Senor turned this argument back on the Republican establishment.

“There is some kind of systemic crisis in the world of polling, particularly on the right-of-center polling; the modeling was way off,” he said. “Although not just on the Republican side — you saw Gallup make some similar mistakes … the assumptions made about what the electorate looked like were way off. The Republican establishment needs to do an audit here and figure out how our understanding of what the electorate looked like was way off.”

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