47 percent of the Republican electorate is "not sure." Taken together, this means that 62% of Ohio Republicans don't understand that the death of Bin Laden happened on Obama's watch and by Obama's order. They don't understand that Mitt Romney held no political position whatsoever at that time.
I'm trying to understand how anyone can conjure up an alternate reality in which Mitt Romney had anything to do with the Bin Laden raid.
I'm also trying to understand how 13 percent of Democrats can be unsure about the identity of the person who ordered that raid. One percent of Dems credits Mitt Romney.
I've spent the past hour trying to think of something to say about these poll results, but every time I contemplate the numbers, my mind sizzles and fries. It's like trying to figure out how Dr. Lao managed to get that huge circus into just a few saddle bags.
Dylan Matthews, writing in the Washington Post, blames these poll numbers on "sampling error." Ridiculous, sayeth I. If "sampling error" can produce results of this sort, then no poll would ever offer any worthwhile information. That said, the column offers some troubling insights:
What’s more, correcting peoples’ factual misunderstandings doesn’t seem to help at all. Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth and Jason Reifler of Georgia State ran experiments measuring whether partisans who read news articles with correct information that ran against their ideological views were likelier to hold the right factual beliefs. They found the opposite effect — correcting people, in other words, doesn’t inform them, it creates a backlash.Maybe it doesn't matter who wins the upcoming election. Can democracy function in a country where the vote of a nescient ninny has the same value as a vote cast by a person of normal intelligence?
Telling conservatives that there were no WMDs in Iraq made them more likely to say there were weapons, and telling them that the Bush tax cuts reduced revenue made them more likely to say they increased revenue.
0 comments:
Post a Comment