But I see you as intelligent, and possibly able to learn from this mistake. If you’ve never read much about persuasion and how humans distort our thinking to remain comfortable in our (sometimes erroneous) beliefs, you might want to check it out. I’m an old guy, so this isn’t a very current book, but you could check out Aronson’s **The Social Animal **and the assoicated collection of articles (“Readings about The Social Animal”, I think) might be a good start. I’m sure you could pick them up used for a song.
Amazingly, it turns out that if you ask a bunch of people before an election who they intend to vote for, most will eventually vote for the guy they said they were going to vote for.
I guess people might be wondering if this experience would affect your confidence in the future in similar situations. That’s what I’m wondering.
I’m also wondering if you altered your opinion about “the whole ‘oversampling Democrats’ that the left likes to dismiss.” Do you still think the left was “dismissing” something? I mean, something relevant that they should be wary of?
-BB
Seriously? Interesting how much verbiage there was before. I would imagine an honest attempt at a ‘post-mortem’ would require at least as much verbiage to analyze where mistakes were made.
For example- as I touched on in the last post- have you changed your position on the sensibility of dismissing the whole “over-sampling of Democrats” issue? Where was the flaw in your reasoning?
I don’t believe for a second that you are being honest about this.
-BB
I’m actually very curious about exactly where OMG thinks he (and his original link) went wrong.
Right. A pithy dismissive one-liner does not a post-mortem make. Not by a long shot.
-BB
OMG admitted it. He accepts that there really is a D+6 “skew” in the electorate now, that the polls weren’t wrong, and that republicans are in trouble if things don’t change. He said all this already. Stop running it into the ground.
Or the explanation* posted every other time either adaher or OMG said “Romney’s got a double digit lead among independents. Obama can’t possibly win!” was correct.
*In summation ('cause I don’t feel like tracking down the link): In recent years, the number of self-identified independents went up significantly, self-identified Republicans went down by almost the same amount, and self-identified Democrats held steady. Romney led by large margins among independents mainly by recapturing a lot of those Republican defectors.
Clearly, facts have a liberal bias.