But, but, but… it’s the skewed polls!
September 28, 2012 1 Comment
I think Kevin Drum’s comments about the latest conservative denialism over polls they don’t like is spot on:
A couple of years after the 2004 election, a guy named Nate Silver started deconstructing polls in minute detail and explaining exactly what made some polls good and others bad. His approach was unsparingly rigorous and his overarching message was: don’t kid yourself. The numbers are what the numbers are, and they don’t care if you’re a liberal or a conservative. Week after week, Silver dug deep into the minutiae of how polls are put together and how they’re conducted, writing lengthy, table-laden posts that often meandered through several thousand words. Liberals loved it. Before long he was, for all practical purposes, the liberal patron saint of polling…
So far at least, the conservative approach has been….different. Their patron saint going into the last few weeks of the 2012 campaign is Dean Chambers, a blogger who runs a site called UnSkewed Polls. Chambers does not dig deep into the numbers. He doesn’t explain sample sizes and cell phone biases. He does just one thing: he reweights all the polls so they have the same proportion of Democrats and Republicans estimated by Rasmussen Reports, a pollster with a longstanding Republican house effect. Then he announces what the numbers are after his reweighting is done. Romney is a big winner every time.
Chambers doesn’t even pretend that his approach has any rigor…
And it suggests a fundamental difference between left and right, one that Chris Mooney wrote about earlier this year in The Republican Brain. Neither side has a monopoly on sloppy number crunching or wishful thinking, but liberals, faced with a reality they didn’t like, ended up accepting reality and deciding to learn more about it. That’s the Nate Silver approach. Conservatives, faced with a reality they didn’t like, invented a conspiracy theory to explain it and then produced an alternate reality more to their liking. It’s a crude and transparently glib reality, but that’s apparently what the true believers want.
Sad, but true. Of course there are reality-based thinkers on the right, but like David Frum, they end up getting ignored and marginalized whereas unskewed polls becomes the darling of conservatives.
About Steve Greene
The polling can be correct but the party ahead could conceivably still lose if not enough people actually vote (or are prevented from voting) and the second party gets their people out. Assuming the spread isn’t too great.
I would like to see a poll that asks three questions:
“Are you planning to actually vote? Yes or No”.
“How important is it that you vote in the presidential election on a scale of 1 to 10″ 1 not at all, 10 extremely.
“What is your political affiliation”.
On the main thrust of the post, Republicans are living in a fantasy land. Change isn’t going to come from outside because they don’t listen to anyone on the outside. It’s going to have to come from within the party. As the economy get better I’m sure the party will find or create some issues to wind up the party faithful. Some will leave. But I think a lot of them are going to continue to be wound up tighter and tighter, at least until 2016, or when they (try to) impeach him on some trumped up nonsense.