Hullabaloo

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

 
Dispatch from Conservative Bizarroworld

by digby

Elections expert Richard Hasen poses an important question:

What if President Obama wins re-election and Republicans don’t believe it?

The question isn’t far-fetched. For several weeks, we have seen Republicans challenge the veracity of a number of election-related facts, and the outcome of the presidential election may be no different.

First, some Republicans claimed that public opinion polls were all skewed to show an Obama lead. As Slate reported, 71 percent of self-identified Republicans and 84 percent of Tea Partiers believe in the skew. Republicans confidently claim that the polls are oversampling Democrats, not realizing that these are self-reported party identifications, which rise and fall with candidates’ support.

Distrust of the polls is not a new phenomenon, and it is not confined to Republicans. As Nate Silver pointed out, when Democrats were behind in 2004 they believed the polls were skewed toward Republicans. Fortunately, the Romney debate performance last week apparently was enough to “unskew” the latest numbers.

Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a relatively rosy jobs report, which not only reported better-than-expected hiring for September but also upward revisions for earlier months. Soon thereafter, a number of Republicans, including former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, questioned whether or not the numbers were accurate. Welch tweeted: “Unbelievable jobs numbers ... these Chicago guys will do anything … can't debate so change number.” What evidence did Welch have? Nada.
[...]
All of these conspiracy theories—like the earlier birther controversies—indicate that if we are unlucky enough to have a very close election in November in which President Obama ekes out a victory, we can expect Republicans to question the election results, too. We’ll have the Fraudulent Fraud Squad telling us that Democrats used voter fraud to steal the election. Hucksters like John Fund will point to “bizarre” anomalies in vote totals from Democratic areas and tout new conspiracy theories. Social media will likely fan the flames.

I have never been a believer in "poll-skewing" theories, but I cut the 2004 Dems a little slack because of the results of the 2000 election. When you see a dubious result like that you can be forgiven for being skeptical for a while. As the article points out, the "skepticism" on the right, on the other hand, has morphed into full-fledged delusion.

But then, this was the one of the goals of the Vote Suppression movement. It's true that they want to keep Democratic partisans from voting. But they also need to feed the bedrock conviction that no Democrat can be legitimately elected. They did this going back to Clinton, when Dick Armey famously declared, "Clinton is not my president" and continued when they became rabid dogs in defense of Bush's dubious victory in 2000. Obama won too big for them to create doubt about the legitimacy of the vote, so they came up with this birther nonsense to allow these wingnuts to believe that the president himself wasn't a legitimate candidate.

I don't know what to do about this. We're dealing with a large number of people, including some of our society's wealthiest magnates, who are living in an alternate universe.

For instance:

TUCHMAN: Paul Ryan has said it himself that he believes there is media bias against the GOP ticket. And at these rallies, a widespread belief that presidential preference polls are part of that conspiracy.

TUCHMAN (on camera): Do you think the pollsters want the Obama ticket to be in front?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I do.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE #1: I think they're shaping them for Obama. I mean, the media, the liberal media, and whatever they can to help him.

TUCHMAN: Do you think that the polls that have shown that Obama is in the lead are inaccurate?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, I don't believe those. I don't believe them. I know they had a poll that said that the polls were wrong. They had a poll that said the polls were wrong. So I don't -- I don't believe that.

TUCHMAN: Do you believe the poll that said the polls were wrong?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No. I don't believe any of it.

TUCHMAN: It's easy to bash polls and pollsters. And not at all unusual. But it becomes more complicated when new polling comes out that indicate your candidate is in front.

(Voice-over): That's what happened the middle of our day with Ryan, when a Pew Research poll showed the Romney-Ryan ticket in the lead.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE#1: Everybody says that the polls are skewed in one way, you know? So.

TUCHMAN (on camera): A recent poll has come out that shows Romney in front. How do you feel about that poll?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE#1: Well, he got a good bump, you know, out of the debate.

TUCHMAN: So you're saying you believe that poll?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE #1: Yes.

A lot of people aren't even aware that they're being self-serving. They think it's self-evident that Democrats cannot legitimately be elected because everyone says that the US is a conservative country. And that's just the one's who watch the mainstream news. Those who are tuned into the right wing media hear that Democrats are all radical leftists if not full-fledged communists. And they don't know a single person who is a radical leftist of full-fledged Communist so how could any of them possibly win without cheating?

This is a huge problem for our democracy, but unless some people on the right decide that it's a problem for them I doubt there's anything we can do to change it. Conservative bizarroworld has always been a feature of American life, but now they're making a huge profit at it. It's hard to see what mechanism will change that.

Update: When I say that conservative bizarroworld has always been a part of American life, this has always been ground zero:

Eight of eleven states in the former Confederacy have passed restrictive voting laws since the 2010 election, as part of a broader war on voting undertaken by the GOP. Some of these changes have been mitigated by recent federal and state court rulings against the GOP, yet it’s still breathtaking to consider the different ways Republicans have sought to suppress the minority vote in the region...

The consequences of these changes will be to make it harder for growing minority populations to be able to cast a ballot in much of the South and to make the region more segregated politically at a time when it is becoming more diverse demographically. “The net effect is that the potential for any coalition to exist in the Democratic Party of moderate-to-progressive whites and African-American voters is pretty much decimated,” says Crayton. Obama is betting he can once again turn out such a coalition in states like Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, but that task has become tougher in 2012. The outlook for state and local Democrats in the region is far bleaker.

The regression in the South today when it comes to voting rights is eerily reminiscent of tragic earlier periods in the region’s beleaguered racial history. “After Reconstruction, we saw efforts by conservative whites in Southern state legislatures to cut back on opportunities for black Americans to cast a ballot,” says Crayton. “It’s hard to dismiss the theory that what we’re seeing today is a replay of that scenario.”

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digby 10/10/2012 11:19:00 AM