Oczkowski’s level of confidence was exceedingly high with regard to the votes they knew about, but he was shaking off responsibility for what they didn’t know about. And indeed, he had no real idea about the extent of what they didn’t know. “We don’t know what we don’t know” became the curious cover for what was supposed to be the all-knowing data operation. And now Oczkowski was subtly shifting from “We are going to win” to “We should win.”

“Should win? What is that?” many on the campaign team found themselves asking one another.

And there was another counting issue, arguably the most serious one.

Trump had a problem with numbers, or perhaps an alternative view of them. Where numbers were, for most people, the thing most fixed, for him they were surprisingly, even magically elastic. This was a particular real estate view. A buyer’s $1 million property was a seller’s $5 million property. There wasn’t a number he couldn’t naturally inflate. Of the many legal cases slowly proceeding against Trump, several involved the real value of his assets against the fabulously greater value he had vouched to his lenders. A few years before his run for president, various of his children had gotten into trouble for making assurances about the lineup of deals and buyers they had for apartments in a Trump building that, in fact, they could hardly give away.

Numbers were what you needed them to add up to.

What’s more, it took a particular stomach, which almost nobody had, to bring Trump bad numbers. Even numbers of an equivocal nature somehow reflected on the weakness of the person bringing them. Hence, all numbers, in the telling, became Trump numbers—that is, good numbers for Trump.

Oz numbers were progressively more negative and pessimistic numbers, but they were much less negative and pessimistic than they should have been and yet still far more equivocal than anything Trump was hearing—by the time they got to Trump, they were positively rosy.

“We will win, if no new votes are found”—but this would have been better phrased as: realistically, with the votes still coming in, we will lose.