Rience Priebus Speaks to His Party’s Reality

The job of the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, is to speak up his party, which can’t be easy when a significant portion of that constituency is no longer tethered to reality. This week Priebus played to that crowd by claiming that the GOP had really won the 2012 Presidential campaign:

"I mean, the fact of the matter is Mitt Romney won on the message," Priebus said. "He won on jobs, he won on the economy, he won on the question of, 'Who do you actually think would make a better president?' But where he lost was on the question of, 'Who cares about you?'"

That seems to be yet another attempt to delegitimize Barack Obama as President.

Talking Points Memo analyzed Priebus’s comments.

Exit poll data throws doubt on those claims. Voters were pretty much evenly divided on the question of who would handle the economy better, with Romney edging President Obama by 1 percent [which would be within margins of error].

But it's unclear from the exit polling what led Priebus to believe that Romney "won on jobs" and even more inexplicable why the chairman believes that voters said Romney "would make a better president."

Priebus was right about one thing though: Obama claimed a massive advantage over Romney on the empathy question.

The true facts of the matter are that President Obama was reelected with a clear majority of the popular vote; that Mitt Romney convinced only 47% of American voters that he’d be the better President; and that Priebus’s attempt to claim otherwise is simply a play to OIP Derangement Syndrome.