Looking back we’re likely to see what we might call the Unskewed Poll or Poller Truth movement as a late-breaking and somewhat hard-to-explain-in-retrospect part of the 2012 campaign cycle. But lets note some of the tie-ins to our everyday and on-going political lives.
This shouldn’t surprise us. It fits a pattern.
Like if the overwhelming consensus of scientific opinion supports the idea of human-driven climate change but you just don’t buy the hokum the liberal junk science mafia wants you to believe. And anyway, it still snows sometimes, so who’s fooling who? Or how a trillion dollars of fiscal stimulus poured into the economy over two years didn’t create a single job and actually made the recession worse.
Every person and group of persons has tendencies to create reinforcing worlds of their own reality where wishful-thinking and special-pleading are reinforced as reality. That’s enabled by cocooned worlds of affinity media. But let’s not pretend it’s an equal thing across the board. Generalized and even principled hostility to science and expert opinion makes it much easier to sustain. But losing an election has the clarity of hitting a brick wall at 100 miles an hour. Call it the ultimate disconfirming experience.
