All throughout the election there was a fight between the pollsters, which indicated Obama was almost always in the lead, and conservative pundits who claimed the polls were biased and in fact Romney had the advantage. We now know how is true, but someone from the Atlantic gathered anecdotal evidence to suggest the Romney campaign itself bought into the pundit's spin as well.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/11/whole-romney-ticket-believed-unskewed-polls/58852/In the last weeks of the campaign, Romney's campaign sounded super confident -- New York's Jonathan Chait wrote that they were bluffing when aides said they could win Nevada, or when Romney surrogate Rob Portman called Ohio a "dead heat." That sounded ridiculous because Romney never led Obama in polling averages of Ohio, and Obama was ahead or tied in all of the last 30 polls done in the state except one by Republican-leaning Rasmussen.
Conservatives began claiming the polls were wrong, that they vastly overestimated what turnout levels would be among blacks, Latinos, and young people. UnSkewedPolls.com changed the number of Democrats and Republicans in polls to show Romney leading everywhere. You'd expect Romney's campaign to play this up publicly to maintain supporters' enthusiasm -- like when political director Rich Beeson said the Sunday before the election that Romney would win more than 300 electoral college votes. But you don't expect them to actually believe it. But Romney, his wife, Ryan, and his wife apparently did.
In other words, they believed their own hype.
To refresh, UnSkewedPolls.com took existing Rasmussen poll data, changed the political demographic to be more Republican-friendly, and then claimed Romney would win by a landslide. Every GOP operative claimed Romney would win between 271-330 EVs, based mostly on guesstimates. Less extreme but equally wrong was the meme that minorities would somehow vote in lesser proportions than they did in 2008, giving Romney the win; we also know this isn't true. This last fallacy was openly believed by a number of GOP strategists.
What this shows is the Bubble which gives FSTDT so many of its glorious quotes has now enveloped the highest echelons. And this will affect the decision making of the 2016 crop. Most of these guys would've entered office after FOX News was set up in 1996, they simply receive a whole another reality than we do. That's why all the stupid excuses given by pundits so far have been so wrong, its because their reality and ours simply aren't the same anymore.