Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus applied some dizzying spin on Wednesday to the outcome of the 2012 presidential election.
Forget the final results. Priebus told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd that voters thought Mitt Romney had the better presidential chops.
“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?'”
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.
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.
A spokesman for the RNC did not respond to TPM’s request for comment.
