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The victory of President Barack Obama over Mitt Romney should prompt some intense soul searching by Republicans. What the Republicans need most of all is a reality check. The pundits will all say the right wing should reconsider its hostility toward women, minorities, unions, and lower-income people. That’s all true, but it sidesteps the larger issue: the party’s complete divorce from reality.
A typical day for Fox pollsters.
Nowhere was the disconnect from reality more tangible than the disconnect over public opinion polling. In the final days before the election, the battle over polling data nearly eclipsed the presidential race itself. One set of polls showed Obama winning the election, while other polls showed his challenger ahead. Even veteran political pros were confused by the data.
Obama maintained a slight lead in nearly all the polls until the first debate on October 3. As long as Obama was conclusively ahead, Fox News insisted that the polling was skewed. Once Romney pulled in front by a narrow range, Fox began to give credence to polling data. After that initial bump faded, the different surveys began to splinter. At one point, Rasmussen and Gallup showed Romney leading the president by up to 5 percentage points. From then on, Fox News showed only the polls that favored Romney.
All the Foxiest commentators – Sean Hannity, Karl Rove, Charles Krauthamer, Dick Morris and the vile Ann Coulter among them – declared that Romney would carry the lion’s share of swing states. Most of their projections showed Romney wins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, all of which landed in the Obama column early on election night, as well as all the swing states of Ohio, Iowa, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado. They all pointed to the polls showing what they wanted to see as if contrary polls did not exist. Is there something in the Kool-Aid that makes everybody delusional at Fox News?
Viewers of real news outlets, such as PBS, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN or MSNBC, saw a totally different picture. They chewed on the conflicting polls, the ones with Romney clearly in front, as well as other ones that gave the lead to the president. Those networks also quoted Real Clear Politics, which averages all the reputable polls, which often showed a tie. Nate Silver wrote spot-on columns which crunched polling data with amazing accuracy for the second consecutive race. For his prescience, he was mocked and attacked by the right wing.
I don’t object to incorrect prognostications. I’ve been dead wrong on many predictions. All of us have been. Most shameful is the blatant use of suspect data, especially when a more complete panorama of surveys was widely available.
If Fox was truly a news organization rather than a partisan political propaganda machine, it would have informed its viewers about all the polls.
Polling data is not the only reason we should question the Republican grasp of reality. Look at the major gaffes by Republican candidates. Senate candidate Todd Akin insisted that women can’t get pregnant from a rape. How many obstetricians would confirm that? Fellow candidate Richard Mourdock believes pregnancy resulting from rape is divinely inspired. Nobody can prove or disprove God’s will, so that one is off the table. Romney says corporations are people. OK, Mitt. Show us any common reference material that substantiates such a contention.
These notions don’t exist in a vacuum. Obama was characterized as being born in Kenya, a practitioner of Islam, a communist, a fascist and described in horrific racial terms. Those absurd assertions all got aired on Fox as if they were serious ideas.
My question is when the news about Obama’s victory finally sinks in, how are conservatives who get all their news and world view from Fox News going to react? Will they continue to believe these fairy tales and propaganda pills dressed up as news, or at least question what they are spoon-fed by Fox? I wish I could say no, but after researching the Obama haters since 2008, I highly doubt it.
John Wright is the author of The Obama Haters: Behind the Right-Wing Campaign of Lies, Innuendo and Racism.
Image by Kate Hiscock under a Creative Commons license on flickr.
6 Comments
I don’t think diehard Republicans will ditch Fox after this. It’s like watching porn for them. Very viscerally satisfying. They can construct a figment of their reality as how they wished the world truly was. Rage at the idiot box in front of them is about all the effort they can muster to participate in politics or comment on public affairs of state.
It’s why I don’t watch Jennifer Granholm on Current. The Dems engage in this jerk off ritual too at times.
This is the inevitable price you pay for believing your own hype.
Habitual liars also risk this dangerous outcome.
In manufacturing consensus, one must be careful to create a consensus that conforms at some elemental level with one or another existing reality, or risk being left standing on the sidelines with a sack full of nothing more than your own wishful thinking.
Karl Rove’s live, televised melt-down after FOX called Ohio for Obama last night is documentation of this phenomenon.
It is already clear to me, through online postings from conservative friends and family, that the world view that Fox News and other right wing outlets foster, leads the viewers/consumers of that information to one conclusion: everyone else is crazy. If everything Fox (and friends) says is true, I would be crazy to vote against Mitt. Luckily, I get almost none of my information from a single source. And definitely not Fox.
LMAO!! How many wives told their dumb republican husbands they were for #shittymitty and then pulled the lever for President Barack Obama? LOTS.
This is a temptation by no means unique to the Republicans. Here
in California, I’m afraid that some of us involved in the
campaign for Proposition 34 to end the death penalty at least
came close to such misestimations — although a number of us, at
least, realized that we weren’t so likely to win this time. And
that made it psychologically easier to deal with the actual
47-53 result and resolve to resist any executions with all our
might until we do win at the polls, or possibly in the courts.
In 1989 and 2009, polls showed that 2/3 or more of Californians
supported the death penalty “in the abstract,” but about any
equal majority would prefer life without parole (LWOP) plus a
requirement for labor and restitution to victims — or LWOP+R
for short. And a 2010 survey showed that 63% of Californians
liked the idea of commuting the sentences of the 700+ people on
Death Row to LWOP, and saving vast amounts as a result.
So in 2011, after a legislative bill to place the issue on the
ballot didn’t get anywhere, an initiative campaign to collect
what proved to be 800,000 signatures (we needed a bit more than
500,000) got launched. We were supposed to be well over 50%
before taking this step, given the attrition from the simple
fact that people uncertain about a ballot initiative are very
likely to vote “No” on general principle.
This year, as the campaign got going and polls focused on
Proposition 34 — getting it on the ballot was itself a triumph
for a community-building effort — it became clear that we were
getting divisions of 42-45 or the like, with lots undecided.
Not such good news! At that point, the sane thing was to know
that we were in trouble. The spate of advertising and education
near the end, plus an excellent ballot summary by the legislative
analyst, stating expected savings of $100 million or more a
year, helped us, but not quite enough.
The conventional wisdom that if you don’t have more than 50%
support in the polls for an initiative, you’re in trouble,
proved all too accurate. Last night, by the time 30%-40% of the
California vote was in, the statement “It’s going to be a long
night” related more to figuring out the next moves for death
penalty abolitionists rather than keeping up much suspense about
the outcome.
That didn’t mean it wasn’t an interesting evening-morning, if
not an especially happy one. The substantial number of
California counties where we won, and sometimes won big, show
that this campaign was not for nought. And the people power
behind those statistics, including African-Americans and the
Chicano/a community, was one sign of a force for good going far
beyond this issue alone.
The truth might be that this campaign was a necessary battle for
education and community organizing, but not the one to decide
the war. I’m glad that I did heed the conventional wisdom enough
not to be too surprised by the predictable outcome.
I love the reference to ‘real news sources’ – all of them basically owned by the same small, interconnected entities. Who is living in a fantasy world? You keep looking in the same mirror over and over again to reassure you that your view of the world is right, but you call the mirror by different, very ‘reputable’, names.
I think reality-based people acknowledge that we cannot trust the polls, the media, or the election results. You can’t hope to make progress towards knowing something when you don’t even begin to acknowledged what you don’t know. If the same five interconnected companies are baking your information, you can be sure that you aren’t getting reality from them.