House of Eratosthenes

…[T]he Bradley Effect has resurfaced dramatically in a different manner in the Wisconsin recall vote. The polls — and, yes, the exit polls as well – were showing Scott Walker in a narrow victory. But he won beyond anyone’s prediction.

Apparently, the silent majority of Wisconsin voters didn’t want to admit to nosy pollsters and anyone else that might be listening that they were opposed to runaway unions, runaway spending, or the Democratic administration. They just wanted to cast their votes. And they did.

This Bradley Effect, then, is not like the Bradley Effect of yore. It’s about race to some degree, but I suspect there are much larger components of being fed up with elites of all sorts, interest groups, media groups, union groups, all sorts of groups telling the average citizen what he should and shouldn’t think, openly or covertly threatening to ostracize him or her for not going along with the pervasive liberal status quo.
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And needless to say, the mainstream media are going to be doing mental cartwheels, trying to think of ways to spin this. It’s not going to be easy. The sons and daughters of Grub Street are going to have to explain away a horrendous economy. They invented Barack Obama (quite literally); now they are going to have to live with him.

It has been said that an election is the only poll that matters. We sure are fascinated with all the other ones, when the elections aren’t happening…one has to wonder if it isn’t due to the innate subconscious understanding that the polls are almost certain to make fools out of everyone who pays attention to them.

Perhaps, when all’s said & done, the economy is a better crystal ball. Once the misery has set in and the suffering becomes personal, it’s a tough row to hoe for any tax-n-spend incumbent to survive. People who have struggled, I think, get it. It’s like breathing. If you can’t pay for your power and your food and your hot water, nothing else matters. Certainly you don’t care about vaguely and dubiously “constitutional” marriage privileges for some small minority of the population.

I’m thinking there’s a “Bradley Effect” with empty cupboards & gas tanks. The 2008 Obama voter who’s now out of work and doesn’t see anything getting any better anywhere, while the public sector employees retire with fat and exorbitant pensions and his leaders lecture him about turning his resentment toward something called “Wall Street,” is being asked to sustain the status quo out of a sense of obligation to some four-year-old-pledge to be a more highly-evolved and more highly-aware good-person. That would be a tough sell even if the pledge was panning out.

Yeah, the local news dim bulbs last night breathlessly reported that the “exit polls” showed that the good people of Wisconsin voted to keep Walker AND planned on voting for Barry come Nov. Great chuckle before bedtime.

Landslide. Mark. It. Down.
- tim | 06/06/2012 @ 06:42
I suspect there are much larger components of being fed up with elites of all sorts

Well, that… and rampant union thuggery… and all the other thuggery…

In all seriousness, though, I think that a big component of the “Bradley Effect” is the fact that college kids do quite a bit of the gruntwork for phone polls, exit polls, GOTV, etc. And the kind of college kid who would do unpaid scutwork for a political campaign is…. well, the kind of kid who would do unpaid scutwork for a political campaign. Noxious hippy-dip, pot-smoking, longshoreman’s cap-wearing, emo glasses-sporting, Apple-logoed, whale-kissing, Dukakis-hugging moon maidens, in other words. The kind of kid who tries very hard to be the type of person normal folks long to punch in the face. Add to this the fact that they feel free to twitter all their twisted pathology (note the twitter calls for Walker’s death / bodily harm last night), and no decent citizen would want to get within 50 feet of them, much less answer exit polls.

Thus the Pauline Kael nature of exit polls, especially in highly partisan elections — nobody they know would ever dream of voting for Walker, yet he won by 9 points.

[For the record, I’m sure there are some folks like this on the right. Good thing for us, though, that our obnoxious college kids tend to be far more into things like the deep thoughts of Ayn Rand and Luap Nor — and, of course, legalizing it — than the actual machinery of voting].
- Severian | 06/06/2012 @ 06:52
I think the poll in Obama’s favor is that there are still a lot of folks that would LIKE for Obama to do well. But they are starting to give up on him. Many folks voted for him simply because they felt good about making history by voting in the first black president. They were so taken by that idea that they didn’t bother to see if he was really qualified for the job. Those folks are not quite ready to publicly admit they made a mistake. Many more will be ready to do that, come November.
- teripittman | 06/06/2012 @ 17:49
It’s probably obvious from the other stuff I’ve written here over the years, but I think there’s a certain frequency & intensity of hardship necessary for clear thinking, and our culture is lately missing it.

I do not mean to say, by that, that out lives are too comfortable & stress-free. Although, be the awareness present or be it not, we’ve been traveling in that direction as well. What I mean by that is: Do people suffer personally from making the wrong decision? That is missing. They get to decide stuff, but they can’t reap rewards from deciding wisely and they cannot deteriorate individual situations from deciding poorly. Therefore, for those fortunate enough to be able to decide things, it amounts to something along the lines of “What’s your favorite color?” All they get to do is display something about themselves. Sort of grasp, or flail about, for some chance to preserve a sense of identity.

So, no. You won’t hear regret over having voted Obama/’08. Generally, the Obama supporters are as removed from this “I shall profit or suffer from the wisdom or lack thereof in my own decisions” thing as anybody else…that trait is intrinsic to the definition of the class. Yeah they might have said a lot of cause-and-effect stuff, expressing “hope” that Chosen One would “clean up Bush’s mess.” But what they really meant to say all along, was nothing more involved than “Look at me!! Look at who I’m voting for!!” That’s all it was ever about.
- mkfreeberg | 06/06/2012 @ 17:59
But what they really meant to say all along, was nothing more involved than “Look at me!! Look at who I’m voting for!!” That’s all it was ever about.

Well said. Not only does it encapsulate liberalism (pretty much all of it), but it demonstrates how the GOP is going to win in the fall, if they have the testicular fortitude — when a liberal starts screeching “look at me! Look who I voted for!!!”, the proper response will be “Really? Him?! You dumbass.”

Liberals absolutely cannot handle the thought that they’re not the most extra-special super-awesome mega-intellects on the planet. Pointing out the obvious consequences of their folly causes them to lash out and act like… well, like liberals, but of the “we just lost the Wisconsin recall” variety. You know — nasty, petty, vindictive, etc. The behavior of Pharaoh Three-Putt’s supporters are going to push ever more people into the camp of his opponents.
- Severian | 06/07/2012 @ 07:11

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The Polls Are SuspectWednesday, June 6th, 2012

The Polls Are Suspect
Wednesday, June 6th, 2012