David Ress over at The Daily Press’ Shad Plank Blog take a guess as to why the CNU Wason Center poll (and by extension, the Washington Post poll) is so wildly off center:
The students polled 928 active registered voters, and 616 passed their likely voter screen. The spread for voter preference reflects a design effect adjustment and statistical theory says poll conducted the same way should end up with the same result 95 times out of 100.
A caveat that Wason Center director Quentin Kidd points out: many GOP-leaning Virginians are reluctant to tell pollsters how they’ll vote, which can mean a Democrat’s lead, particularly a few weeks out, can be overstated.
I’m not so certain that gets either poll out of the woods. Something went tragically wrong in both — the question is, what?
Some of the problems have already been outlined. But what do you do when Republicans — already skeptical of a media that seems to have teeth bared and claws out for anything “outside of the mainstream” i.e. mildly right of center — refuse to participate in the Democratic bubble of information?
It’s a straight-up credibility problem.
Most of this, of course, is a straight up credibility problem among media outlets in general who put their thumb on the scale when it comes to news and information. A small dose of this is the democratization of media — and in Virginia, the proliferation of alternative outlets for contrasting viewpoints — not to mention the potential for abuse through “fake news” and other malignant operations.
The last ingredient? Good old fashioned confirmation bias. Folks simply want to read and see what they want to read and see. Witness the operation of late night comedy shows being leaned upon as actual news sources, something Jon Stewart manufactured during the anti-Bush era and has been a short-circuit around actual debate for the better part of a decade:
In very much the same way, news condensed to 800 words or more distills into quips and witticisms — and more dangerously, viewpoints cloaked in journalistic prose.
Republicans have simply inoculated themselves, and in an era where one false move, one data point, one poll answer, or one misstep can brand you a bigot, hater, racist, sexist, or what have you? It’s not small wonder why Republicans are dodging the public square and voting their conscience.
Of course, this will probably sound a tad bit hyperbolic. After all, it’s only a poll. But to some degree, it reflects a wider mistrust among conservatives and independents (and traditionalists of every stripe) to mistrust institutions that have decided to nudge the body politic in a way they simply haven’t arrived upon themselves. Vacal Havel wrote about this concept in Power for the Powerless — we have literally arrived at a point where the town is painted in slogans no one reads.
…and that’s how you get Trump.
It just might be how Virginia gets Gillespie as well.
