Trajan
conscientia mille testes
a lot of good points here, plus I would add that for some, it just appeared inconceivable on this basis alone; that someone stuck with an anemic economy 3 years after the recession had ended would be reelected.
Why the Conservative Media Got It So Wrong
There is no doubt that going into the final days of this presidential election there was a greater disparity in the perceptions of what the outcome would be among the media elites of each political side than any other time in the era of modern technology. Liberals were completely convinced that President Obama would be reelected, while conservatives tended to not just believe Mitt Romney would beat him, but that he would do so in a landslide.
So why did the conservative media get it so wrong? Because I am a conservative who was confident that Obama would win a tight race, I think that I may be in unique position to explain why this happened.
First, while you would think that the advent of modern technology and the explosion of polling data which now exists (it is truly staggering how much more information there is today than there was, say, in 1980) would help in making political predictions, it actually does the opposite. This is because having access to so many numbers allows political partisans to cherry-pick which data points they like in order to fit their agenda and preferred outcome.
As Mark Twain is alleged to have said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
For conservatives, this natural human inclination to embrace the data that they like and discard the rest is greatly enhanced, and essentially injected with steroids. This is because they have a very understandable and highly justified distrust of a news media which has been showing open hostility to the prospects of our candidates for as long as any of us can remember.
While I am not the very first person to question the credibility of everything I hear in the news media, having once worked for a polling institute and having commissioned several high profile national polls myself, I understand that polls, while hardly perfect, should not generally be thought of as part of the biased news propaganda machine (which is why, ironically, the Fox News poll is often not at all favorable to conservatives).
But because conservatives are understandably so distrustful of everything they are told by the media, it becomes easy for them to fall into the trap of assuming that polls showing Obama winning are inherently flawed. They are even able to come up with enough real numbers to make arguments which appear to be based in intellect, even though they are really being driven by emotion and self interest.
This phenomenon was made even more pervasive because to the conservative political junkies who spend their lives absorbing every possible news item with the assumption that it is simply not possible to comprehend how anyone would vote to reelect Obama. This fed into their fervent belief that the polls must simply be wrong (as did their forgetting that, when nearly everyone votes in a swing state, it really doesn't matter how much more enthusiastic one side is than the other).
read the rest at-
John Ziegler: Why the Conservative Media Got It So Wrong
Why the Conservative Media Got It So Wrong
There is no doubt that going into the final days of this presidential election there was a greater disparity in the perceptions of what the outcome would be among the media elites of each political side than any other time in the era of modern technology. Liberals were completely convinced that President Obama would be reelected, while conservatives tended to not just believe Mitt Romney would beat him, but that he would do so in a landslide.
So why did the conservative media get it so wrong? Because I am a conservative who was confident that Obama would win a tight race, I think that I may be in unique position to explain why this happened.
First, while you would think that the advent of modern technology and the explosion of polling data which now exists (it is truly staggering how much more information there is today than there was, say, in 1980) would help in making political predictions, it actually does the opposite. This is because having access to so many numbers allows political partisans to cherry-pick which data points they like in order to fit their agenda and preferred outcome.
As Mark Twain is alleged to have said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
For conservatives, this natural human inclination to embrace the data that they like and discard the rest is greatly enhanced, and essentially injected with steroids. This is because they have a very understandable and highly justified distrust of a news media which has been showing open hostility to the prospects of our candidates for as long as any of us can remember.
While I am not the very first person to question the credibility of everything I hear in the news media, having once worked for a polling institute and having commissioned several high profile national polls myself, I understand that polls, while hardly perfect, should not generally be thought of as part of the biased news propaganda machine (which is why, ironically, the Fox News poll is often not at all favorable to conservatives).
But because conservatives are understandably so distrustful of everything they are told by the media, it becomes easy for them to fall into the trap of assuming that polls showing Obama winning are inherently flawed. They are even able to come up with enough real numbers to make arguments which appear to be based in intellect, even though they are really being driven by emotion and self interest.
This phenomenon was made even more pervasive because to the conservative political junkies who spend their lives absorbing every possible news item with the assumption that it is simply not possible to comprehend how anyone would vote to reelect Obama. This fed into their fervent belief that the polls must simply be wrong (as did their forgetting that, when nearly everyone votes in a swing state, it really doesn't matter how much more enthusiastic one side is than the other).
read the rest at-
John Ziegler: Why the Conservative Media Got It So Wrong