Why the shooting-the-messenger or hostility towards any message that "Candidate is facing a serious chance of losing?"

To the extent that this thread is about the phenomenon as reflected on the Dope, I think it’s worth mentioning that we have experience with (and possibly some hypersensitivity to) what has been described as “concern trolling.”

Such that there may be a tendency to attempt to prioritize “accounting for it.”

The obfuscation is successful, I mist report this to the Council.

Thanks for this — I didn’t know there was a name for it.

I don’t think that’s a comparable thing at all to a presidential general election. The most obvious difference is that the overall system allows for two or more national car-rental companies to operate simultaneously and each be successful (profitable). Presidential elections are winner-take-all.

There is a significant difference between predicting the candidate will lose, and saying the candidate is behind. The first is long-term pessimism, something that social scientists have associated with the candidate losing. The latter is consistent with the kind of optimism that wins elections. Consider:

For Presidential Candidates, Optimism Appears a Winner

To the bolded: Not in the media, there isn’t. Not when speaking to a broad audience that includes casual followers of politics and those that barely follow at all. That is, a broad audience containing a lot of people who will accept the predictions uncritically.

Your link is paywalled, but appears to talk about an unrelated issue: Optimisim/pessimism within a president’s camp (the candidate themselves, campaign staff, etc.) versus optimisim/pessimism among the general electorate about a candidate’s chances.

It’s an integral part of their strategy of pretending that they wuz robbed in order to recruit support for various schemes to suborn or outright steal elections.

Correct.

Here’s a 2016 update on the theory, this time with a gift link that should work:

Clinton is more optimistic than Trump. But optimism doesn’t predict winners anymore

As for this just being about candidate optimism, yes. I haven’t seen any research on how optimism among internet denizens, or the general public, affects results. So I looked at what I had in hopes that it might be a little relevant.