“WE’LL HAVE POLITICAL SCIENCE
WRITE BOOKS ABOUT IT. WHAT I
CARE ABOUT IS 15 MORE DAYS TO
GET 270 ELECTORAL VOTES.”
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If Romney wins on Nov. 6, the
2012 debates will quickly enter
that small group of determinative debates.
Much of the talk in the spin
room was less about the debate
and more about the state of the
race. “What do you think?” reporters asked one another over
and over, having heard the spin
from both sides enough to be able
to recite in their sleep. CNN’s Peter Hamby and I compared notes
and came to the same conclusion. “It’s a genuine jump ball,”
Hamby said. I chatted with National Review’s Robert Costa and
BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith. Smith
thought Romney had the momentum. Costa mostly agreed, but he
insisted that Romney still had an
uphill climb.
The spin room was still buzzing
an hour after the final debate had
ended. And the Obama campaign
saw the need to continue spinning
the next morning. Axelrod and
Messina held a conference call
with reporters in which they talked at some length about why they
thought Obama had won the debate, and why they were in a good
position to win on Nov. 6. Axelrod tried to smack down what he
called a “mythology” that states
like Florida and Virginia were
slipping away from Obama.
As Romney flew west from Florida to Nevada, Madden told reporters on the plane with him that
Florida “is like a freight liner, and
once it turns — and I think it’s
turned — it’s hard to turn back.”
That night, at a rally with
12,000 people in Colorado at Red
Rocks, Romney said the debates
had “supercharged” his campaign.
The next day in Reno, he said
Obama had been “diminished”
over the course of the three weeks.
After the last debate, Obama
still held the edge in three key
swing states: Wisconsin, Nevada
and Ohio. Without one of them,
Romney would fail to get the 270
electoral votes necessary to win
the election.