Neoconservative Dan Senor is blaming everything and everyone but former nominee Mitt Romney for Republicans losing the White House in 2012.
In his first appearance on Morning Joe since the election, the former Romney adviser said that a "systemic crisis in the world of polling" gave the campaign bad data.
"I think particularly on right-of-center polling, the modeling was way off," he explained.
While Senor only cited Rasmussen and Gallup, the final Real Clear Politics aggregation of polls came very close on the election outcome and showed that every other major polling organization called the race correctly.
Senor refused to assign any significant blame to the substance Romney's campaign because "if we had picked up 400,000 in a handful of swing states, Mitt Romney would have been a genius."
"The Friday night before the election, we were in Cincinnati, we had this huge rally," he recalled. "You could feel the energy, a hundred top-tier Romney surrogates at the event. I'm backstage with some of them -- I won't mention their names -- but they're talking about Romney like he's [former President Ronald] Reagan. You know, the debate performance were the best debate performances of any Republican nominee in history. This guy's got -- 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 Romney cabinet."
"And I won't say who they are, they know who they are, they were on television -- the body was buried -- five, six days later absolutely eviscerating him."
MSNBC's Richard Wolffe pressed Senor about "what the Republican Party needs to do on policy" to win in the future.
"Look, I'm no longer professionally spinning for Mitt Romney," Senor insisted. "I do think he got a couple of things right and they have been eclipsed by the pile on."
But the man who worked to spin the Iraq war for the Bush administration as the chief spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq did admit that the Republican Party in general needed to do a "better job at thinking trough about how to talk about middle-class economics."
