I hope the Kool-Aid Was Delicious

I swore that I wrote a post about how Mitt Romney's decision to compete in Pennsylvania, while a long shot, was at least grounded in reality. Western Pennsylvania is demographically very similar to the parts of Southern Ohio, West Virginia, Western Virginia, and Eastern Kentucky where Barack Obama is almost as unpopular as Abraham Lincoln was among whites in the Deep South. There's very little early voting in the Keystone State. There are enough electoral votes that it might open up a few paths to victory.

It turns out none of those may have been true, and Team Romney was in full self-delusion mode. They had "unskewed" their own polling to match the partisan shape of the electorate that they expected to find on Election day, which put Romney ahead in Ohio and Florida. Campaigning in Pennsylvania was in an effort to run up the score. Campaigns necessarily entail a large amount of self-delusion, but this is taking things several steps too far.

In fact, these stories exhibit so self-delusional that I'm not totally sure I believe them--they don't line up with the brazen advertising strategy of lying an awful lot that Romney embarked on in the waning days of the campaign.