During the election American Conservatives had a set of alternate beliefs about the validity of polling. Last night, that set of beliefs came up against the hard edge of reality and appeared to shock some conservatives to the core.
Is this an important moment that can be used to wedge against the library of alternate conservative facts?
I guess what I’m asking is, Conservative posters, since you were lied to by your media about the polling on the election, does it open up the possibility in your mind that they perhaps have been lying and misleading you about other things?
Does it render more acceptable the idea that maybe Climate Change might be real, or that maybe Benghazi-gate is hysterics, or perhaps that Universal Health Care works very well in other countries?
Precisely the same thing happened to many Democratic supporters in 2004. You cna find threads from back then with SDMB posters insisting Kerry was going to win, in defiance of what the polls were saying all along.
People can be very willing to deny reality when they’re emotionally invested in an election’s outcome. If you think about it, this must be so. How many elections have you watched? Did you ever see a concession speech to an empty room? Even the really spectacular losers, like Mondale in 1984, had a packed out of party faithful who were irrationaly sure the country would come around to their point of view in time to avoid defeat.
I understand boosterism and positive thinking. But as I recall, in 2004 there weren’t any memes about “oversampling” or alternate guys who just altered the polls to make them more comfortable.
The conspiracy thinking part of it is different.
As I say, hoping the polls will turn around is different than saying they are a systematic attempt by the MSM to dishearten conservatives.
More to the point is the Romney campaign mythology that Obama has single-handedly been destroying the economy, because that’s the probably the one that got Romney the most votes.
I assume this is a rhetorical question, not actually addressed at any conservative posters. Because the premise is that conservatives are fools who are not capable of assessing the validity of their sources of information and who are led around blindly by the conservative media.
Now I understand that this is virtually an article of faith among liberal posters. But it’s not something that any actual conservative posters are likely to cop to. So it’s pointless to ask the question other than as a purely rhetorical device, which I assume is what you’re doing.
They had all sorts of other theories as to why the polls were off. In particular, I remember the notion that vast legions of cell phone users were not being included in the polls, for which reason they were all skewed.
People like to attack other people by claiming that they are conspiracy theorists. Conspiracy theorists have a bad rap (for good reason). The idea that there was a liberal conspiracy regarding the polls was not widespread in conservative circles, to my knowledge. Not that I’m an expert, but I read a number of articles attacking the polls as skewed and none of them suggested any sort of conspiracy.
There’s the possibility that this strategy of misleading their base is exactly what they want. It plays into the message that they’ve been victimized– by godless Liberals, by Muslims, by nefarious groups like Acorn and unions, by socialists, by Europeans, by racist blacks-- all conspiring against America and real Americans.
If they build their base up with certain expectations, but then those expectation suddenly go up in a puff of smoke, the right-wing echo chamber can come back with “Holy shit, the powers alligned against us are even worse than we thought.”
It’s when they have some Boogeyman to point to, and if they can keep their base scared and victimized, that these right-wing media outlets really see ratings go through the roof. If Rush and Beck and Hannity weren’t preaching a gospel of victimhood, they’d have nothing to talk about.
Well that’s the premise of your question. That a conservative person hears Rush or Sean claim it’s a conspiracy of pollsters and says “duh, well, Rush says
so so it must be true”.
As far as the polls, Gallup overestimated Obama’s 2008 margin by 4 points. Evenly distribute that over all states and you have a Romney win. So it is far from unreasonable to question the 2012 polls favoring Obama, certainly not some kind of conspiracy to hide the truth. It’s easy to post after the fact and say you knew the polls were right all along.
I don’t think it’s that simple. Conservative media has over the last few years fought hard for pushing their ideas. FOX News seems credible, but it really isn’t. You aren’t a fool for accepting information from someone you trust.
Apology accepted.
I don’t think the Republicans were thinking that the polls were showing too-much support for Romney.
I posted before and during the fact that the polls were accurate. I pointed out errors people made in their statements about polling, too.
In actual fact, the arguments that people made here against the accuracy of the polling reminds me of nothing so much as the threads we’ve had with people insisting that 0.9999~ was not equal to 1. Those posters were not merely wrong about the facts, they had to insist that standard components of math either did not exist or did not work. And they would continue to do so over and over, even after better informed posters explained their misunderstanding.
That is how bad the arguments against the polls were. It is absolutely true that you can argue the meaning and implications of polls, but stating that the polls were wrong because of basic structural reasons could not possibly work. Their arguments were somewhat more sophisticated and less scurrilous than the likes of Dean Chambers of unskewedpolls.com but the mistakes were as egregious. They couldn’t turn out to be right, and of course they didn’t. The polls and forecasts based off of them worked exactly as advertised, even though the results were unpleasant to many.
The people who post to the 0.9999~ threads seem to be sincere, although they take glee in overturning what to them are experts stating preposterously counterintuitive
interpretations of reality. Reality continues to not care what ignorant people think. It did so in this election cycle, and will do so in every election cycle in the future.
Why do you assume I watched FOX to be lied to just because I voted for Romney? I got the majority of my news this election cycle from the Huffington Post rather than FOX. I’ve known all along that getting rid of Obama was far from a given.
If you think that conservative media isn’t popular with conservatives in general just because you don’t consume it, I think I understand why you might support Romney.
I think what you refer to in this quote is a symptom of a much deeper and more serious ideologically affected paradigm. Just this afternoon I was listening to an unbelievably irrational radio host on a local Toronto “conservative” radio station and she had for a guest a very smart professor from San Francisco based university who was trying to present to her a case for a change in voter pattern that led to increase in a number of people who will not only vote Democrat but also vote progressive. Almost every claim this professor made was backed up by little snippets of facts and historical analysis of municipal, state and federal elections and his case was so tight she had no way of countering it.
In the end she thanked him and the guy went off the phone only for her to say, and I paraphrase, okay, I may not agree with all what he said but, that’s how he felt about US election and I respect his right to feel that way so i’m going to open lines (it’s a talk show) to hear how you feel about it. And I was like - are you effin crazy stupid? It’s not how he FELT - he told you how it IS - why can’t you accept it? Then, it occurred to me that democracy for these types means that ANY opinion regardless if it’s backed by logic or facts is worth the same just because you are expressing it.
And that’s what I think is happening to Republicans - I have an opinion and it’s somewhat different, but people will accept the value of it being expressed and not necessarily the degree in which that opinion aligns with reality.
Rape claims that made headlines is a prime example of that - it’s an opinion that has a value in terms of what is suggested by it and not by inherent value of is it based on fact or logic.
My theory is that the GOP has become an organization that really is not about representing the population so much as pushing something on them. What they want is perhaps good for GOP insiders, but probably not for you, and so they can’t just baldly describe their plans. They have to disguise them. Pushing false premises gives them more opportunities to present their ideas as what is best for the country than a scrutinized reality will.
John Kerry won the election in 2004, but he decided he didn’t think the country could withstand another disputed national election after the Supreme Court chose Bush in 2000, so elected not to challenge Ohio to a recount.
