Zombietime: The Left’s Big Blunder 15 October, 2008

An interesting statistical and psychological analysis of the lefts strategy in 2008 and its impending failure. Its extremely long so I quoted some of the more important sections below so you could get the basic idea.

The disastrously counter-productive strategy of Obama\’s supporters

Excerpts;

The illusory quest for conformist decision-making in the 2008 presidential election

Say, for example, that you were an Obama supporter who watched the Vice Presidential debate and felt that Palin had done well and was a more effective debater than Biden — though not well enough to change your mind about voting for the Obama-Biden ticket. Immediately afterward you encounter an online poll, asking you to vote on who won the debate. What do you do? I suspect that most, if not nearly all, Obama supporters would lie and still vote in the poll that Biden had won the debate, even though they felt that Palin had in fact defeated him. But why do so? As an Obama supporter, you still want your candidate to win, so that every action you take should revolve around only one question: Will this help Obama win? Probably unconsciously, people assume without really thinking about why, that if enough people say Biden won the debate, then a general consensus will be reached that Biden did win the debate, and as a result some vague category of Americans who up until that point had not been Obama supporters will change their allegiances and in reality vote for Obama-Biden on election day.

The Obama campaign itself also takes advantage of the sympathetic media to construct a facade of inevitability. The campaign will stage-manage crowds and dictate camera angles so that Obama is seen to not only have overwhelming numbers of fans but the correct demographic proportion of fans; the campaign will coordinate Obama appearances to coincide with rock concerts or other festivals so they can point to the huge crowds who showed up to watch Obama; and the media plays right along.

McCain supporters often complain about this strategy by the Left, going to great pains to point out the poll stuffing, the deceptive photos, the crowd overestimation, the slanted media coverage, and so forth. But should conservatives be so concerned? I propose that McCain supporters should be GLAD this is happening — because the Left is in fact making a disastrous strategic blunder.

Who Does the Polling?

A key component of this strategy is an over-reliance on polling, since poll numbers which show Obama apparently in the lead can be used to club undecided voters or McCain supporters into submission. You’re all alone. Nobody else thinks like you. Your side is losing. You’re out of touch. Change your mind — join the winning team. But the polls may not reflect what we imagine they reflect.

The actual grunt-work of doing public-opinion polling is a low-paying job that doesn’t require much (or any) experience. The people asking the “Who will you vote for?” questions either sit in a room for hours on end making repetitive calls, or walk door-to-door in potentially dodgy neighborhoods — not particularly high-end work. Who would apply for and accept such a job? Not someone who already has a higher-paying job. Not someone who has experience or skills that would allow them a better career or position. Not someone who is middle-class or middle-aged. Not someone who is wealthy. Generally, I wager, college students, the under-employeed and/or the under-educated make up the majority of people who do the actual rubber-meets-the-road polling of asking the questions and writing down the answers. Though there are no published statistics about the demoographics of pollers themselves, the fact that, for example, The Gallup Poll routinely recruits entry-level call-center employees on college campuses lends support to this supposition. And, anecdotally, when I was a college student I briefly worked for a public-opinion call center doing this exact kind of job, and my fellow pollers were almost all college students or underemployed folks, some of whom only worked a limited number of hours per week so as to still qualify for government benefits.

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This fact has potentially significant implications for the outcomes of polls. Imagine, for a moment, that you were one of the rare McCain supporters in a polling call-center; wouldn’t you be a little depressed if person after person you called stated that they were intending to vote for Obama? How could you not be? But what if you were an Obama supporter working in that same call center? Wouldn’t you be elated or enthused to hear the votes for Obama piling up? Of course you would. Ah, but pollers are under strict instructions to not reveal their personal opinions to the people they’re polling. And I’m sure that most try to follow the rules. But even if you grant that, say, 90% of them manage to maintain complete neutrality, and not let some kind of expectation creep into their voice or attitude, that still leaves 10% who might consciously or unconsciously be slanting the results. And that’s all it would take to screw up a poll. Even a 95% honesty rate leaves room for 5% bias in the results, which can be very significant in a close race like this one.

Yet I’m not concerned about the 10% or 5% of pollers who consciously allow their personal opinion to slip into the conversation. I’m concerned about the 90%+ who try to appear impartial. The operative word here is “try” — because as we learned from an amazing horse (yes, a horse), “trying” isn’t good enough.

Conformity and the Asch Experiments

Solomon Asch (on the far right) and six assistants trick the test subject (third from the right with a white shirt, tie, and crew cut) into thinking he’s taking a vision test.

Implicit in the Left’s continuous attempts to exaggerate Obama’s perceived support is the belief that “a crowd draws a crowd” and that undecided voters will be drawn to the Obama camp if they think “everyone else” is supporting him. But is that an accurate assessment? Is there any evidence that it’s true?

Well, actually, yes. There is evidence. Or should I use scare quotes: “evidence.” I believe that a series of experiments carried out in the 1950s by social psychologist Solomon Asch were in fact the (now long-forgotten) inspiration for and justification for the current strategy, especially the strategy of online opinion-poll-stuffing after debates and other major news events.

Starting in 1951, Asch, a professor at Swarthmore College, ran a series of unusual experiments to generate a quantitative measurement of the subjective term “conformity.” The experiments, which many now consider somewhat unethical and a bit sadistic, went like this:

A volunteer was recruited to participate in a vision test. He was brought to a room with seven other volunteers who were also to take the same test, in a group. Little did the volunteer know, however, that his fellow “volunteers” were all confederates of the experimenter, and the test was not a vision test but a psychological torture session designed to elicit conformist behavior. The experimenter would then unveil a pair of displays, one showing a single black line, and the other showing three black lines of varying lengths. The volunteer is told to simply state which of the three lines most closely matches the length of the single line.

A volunteer was recruited to participate in a vision test. He was brought to a room with seven other volunteers who were also to take the same test, in a group. Little did the volunteer know, however, that his fellow “volunteers” were all confederates of the experimenter, and the test was not a vision test but a psychological torture session designed to elicit conformist behavior. The experimenter would then unveil a pair of displays, one showing a single black line, and the other showing three black lines of varying lengths. The volunteer is told to simply state which of the three lines most closely matches the length of the single line.

Which line on the right — A, B or C — matches the length of the line on the left? In the privacy or your own home and your own mind, you’d almost certainly answer “A.” But if you were in a large group of people who all insisted that “C” was the answer, you might very likely answer “C” as well — either because you feared being rejected socially by the group, or because you doubted your own perceptions and deferred to the opinions of others.

Sounds simple, right? In every instance, the correct answer was quite self-evident, as only one of the lines was even close to the correct length. The volunteer, who was always placed in the second-to-last position, was only allowed to state his answer after he had heard most of the other faux-volunteers give their answers. For the first two rounds, these confederates were instructed to give the obviously correct answer; in each instance, the test subject would then also give the correct answer. But starting on the third round, the confederates, as instructed by Asch, intentionally gave a consistently wrong answer; the goal of the experiment was to see if the volunteer would “break” and also begin to chime in with the wrong answer as well. Most volunteers would resist for a few rounds, but eventually the majority would cave in at least part of the time and give the wrong answers in complete defiance of their own perceptions. Overall, the test subjects gave the wrong answers 36.8% of the time — an astonishing result.

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What would you do if you had the ability to conduct this “experiment” on a vast scale? And if the results of the experiment were not just of academic interest, but affected the real world? What would you do if you had a monopoly on the media, and could affect each individual’s perception of how the general public felt? You could take the Asch experiment nationwide. You could deceive every single individual voter into thinking he was all alone in his opinions. And consequently, due to social pressures to conform, they’d change their allegiances. You could use it to win elections.

That’s the position in which the Left — the Obama campaign, its supporters, and the liberal media — imagine themselves to be. They’re trying to use the principle of behaviorial conformity as a weapon in the campaign. But there is a terrible flaw in their plan. The Asch experiment doesn’t work unless the test subject is unaware that he is being duped. And I’m telling the subject right now: you’re being duped.

Normative and Informational Conformity

In post-experiment interviews, during which Asch revealed the ruse, the test subjects gave one or the other of two completely different reasons for agreeing with the wrong answers. One personality type said that, although they were fully aware what the correct answer was and that everyone else was giving the wrong answer, they themselves repeated the wrong answer publicly because they “didn’t want to go against the grain” or to appear like a freak or an outsider, or be rejected by their peers. This attitude was given the unwieldy moniker “normative conformity“, in which “a person publicly accepts the views of a group but privately rejects them.” The other personality type doubted their own perceptions, and assumed that if an entire group of people thought Line “C” was the correct answer, then it must in fact be the correct answer, despite the subject’s own first impression that it was the wrong answer. This type of person actually changed their opinion based on the group’s apparent consensus, and would have answered “C” even if allowed to do so anonymously. This attitude was dubbed “informational conformity,” in which “a person accepts the views of the group” as actually valid and adopts them internally.

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I submit that this assumption is a catastrophic blunder. To the extent that there is any conformist behavior being exhibited by McCain supporters and undecided voters, it is much more likely to be normative conformity. In other words, people who are confronted with apparent overwhelming support for Obama may indeed announce that they too support Obama, but do so only in order to avoid ostracism or accusations of racism. Inside, however, they have not changed their minds. On November 4, they will go into that voting booth, and in total privacy and anonymity, they are free to vote for whomever they want, without fear of social condemnation for doing so. And in such a setting, normative conformity disintegrates, because there is no “norm” to conform to when your vote is anonymous.

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Conclusion

Now, it could very well be that, after all is said and done, Obama will indeed win this election — I can’t predict the future any better than can anyone else. The Obama campaign and its supporters are also engaging in many other strategies (unrelated to the exaggeration of his popularity) that have likely been effective — such as blanketing the airwaves with advertisements, disparaging McCain, insulting Palin, and so on. The unabashed and unapologetic Obama boosterism from the traditional media certainly isn’t hurting either. In prior elections, candidates worried about an “October Surprise,” some last-minute revelation or scandal that threatens to realign the entire race. But in 2008, two or three October Surprises seem to be cropping up every single day, and there’s no reliable way to predict what will happen next (other than that the media will try to emphasize the anti-McCain news and downplay the anti-Obama news). And it may be that less than 50% of the population was ever interested in voting for McCain in the first place, and that an Obama victory was a foregone conclusion long before the campaign even began; I simply don’t know. However, if Obama does win, it will be IN SPITE OF the counter-productive antics of his supporters, not because of them. I feel that all the exaggerations and bias polling and online poll-stuffing and comment-spamming have only served to increase a desperate come-from-behind energy in the McCain campaign, and induce a sense of complacency and inevitable victory among rank-and-file Obama voters. However: If McCain wins, then Obama’s supporters will only have themselves to blame.

Will the exaggerations become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as assumed, or are Obama supporters spinning further and further away from reality, constructing one unsupportable exaggeration on top of another — only to be stunned on election day when the actual results, once again, don’t match either their pre-vote opinion polling or their post-vote exit polling?

Yet it may very well be that an army of glum, dispirited and pessimistic conservatives will reluctantly trudge to the polls on November 4, each one imagining they are the only remaining person in the entire country voting for McCain, and lo and behold — they’ll turn out to be a silent majority after all.

Obama owes Palin, McCain, and supporters an apology

The secret service announced today that they had investigated the claims that a McCain supporter yelled “Kill Him” at a rally w/ Sara Palin the other day and have found the allegations completely unfounded. There was absolutely no one, including the security for the event that could coroberate the claim made by a single local leftist reporter,  David Singleton of the Scranton Times-Tribune at the event.  I think Obama needs to apologise to McCain for using this completely false charge several times in last night’s debate. He even went as far as to whine that Sara Palin “didn’t mention, didn’t stop, didn’t say hold on a second”. Thats because it didn’t happen, now we know that Sara wasn’t even on stage at the time the local hack reporter made the claim. Congressional candidate Chris, Hackett was speaking at the time of the now debunked claim.