Poll denialism

Source

People are starting to make some connections:

One of the odder little subplots of the 2012 election has been the growth of poll denialism among Republicans. As Mitt Romney's chances have grown ever dimmer, a cottage industry has sprung up on the right claiming that presidential polls suffer from liberal bias and Romney is really doing better than they say. "When the published poll shows Obama ahead by, say, 48-45," explains conservative pundit Dick Morris, "he's really probably losing by 52-48!"

Now, this is hardly in the same league as climate denialism or evolution denialism.

Or vaccine denialism or rape denialism or . . . well, you get the idea. Here in America, one of our major parties has responded to the revolution in personal communication that began with 24 hour cable news and progressed to smartphones and the blogosphere by developing an independent, self-reinforcing, weather-dominator-scale doomsday device of cognitive dissonance.

There is no unpleasant reality, the right has discovered, that cannot be shouted down by 128-bit quad-core sophistry. The latest fact to be dragged, gagged and bound, towards the conservative memory hole is Romney's dismal prospects in the upcoming elections:

congressworksforus posted a comment in On Polls and Polling · 2 days ago

I can guarantee you that the Romney campaign has access to far better polling than any polling organization that's posting public polls.
The fact they are NOT changing course simply tells me that Erick is wrong, and that the public polls are horrible this time around.
The fact that Obama has (if you pay attention) essentially given up on being re-elected (could he possibly make any more mistakes than he has the past couple of weeks) tells me that his campaign knows it is toast as well.
Turnout will favor Republicans. The GOP built a ground game after 2008 that was effective (but not overwhelmingly) in 2010, but was *incredibly* effective a few months ago in Scott Walker's recall election (he got more votes than when we was first elected!)
Believe me, Obama is not winning Ohio, nor is he winning Florida, and without either, he ain't winning. 

Yep, we'll just take your word for it, anonymous Restate commenter. Poll denialism is rich with the sort of useful idiots who feel that good old horse sense and five minutes on WUWT qualifies them to dismiss radiative physics. Chait's take here: 

This was the week that the political world discovered the burgeoning world of conservative polling denial. Just like other, better-established fields of conservative reality denial, the polling denial movement has its own levels of insanity. At the core sit the most fanatical of the denialists, like unskewedpolls.com, a popular site that offers its own twist on public opinion data, which currently has Mitt Romney leading Barack Obama by 7.8 percent nationally.

The poll denialists’ argument holds that the polls — all of them, except Rasmussen, conducted by a right-wing pundit with a terrible record of accuracy — are over-sampling Democrats, finding nearly as many of them as showed up at the polls in 2008, which they consider a high-water mark for Democrats unlikely to be repeated. Pundits have patiently explained that polls do not make assumptions about the party identification of voters but merely report what voters tell them. And the most plausible explanation for the higher number of Democrats in polls is that increasing numbers of conservatives who reliably vote Republican are identifying themselves as independents to pollsters.

So poll denialism is silly, and the conspiratorial explanation undergirding it is deranged.

Steven Taylor is on the same page:

I am astonished at the degree to which many who are rooting for Romney seem to be in total denial about the polling.  For example, the following from Katrina Trinko at NRO:

But regardless of partisan breakdown, Republicans should be wary of taking any polls as completely accurate.
“Part of the reason the Democrats won in 2008 was that when it looked as if McCain was going to lose, some Republicans stayed home,” argues McLaughlin. “So if President Obama is in a dead-even race with Mitt Romney in so many swing states, if the Democrats can convince enough Republicans they’re going to lose, it could take a one-point loss for the Democrats to a one-point win.”

Emphasis mine.
The thing that is remarkable about the above is that it not only in based in an approach that privileges preference over reality, it comes with a built-in fairy tale to explain any non-preferred results!  Using the logic above the polling can be wrong whilst predicting the actual outcome and, better yet, the wrong polling (that was actually right) wasn’t just wrong, but it caused the wrong outcome to occur!
Life would be better for all of us if we were all, regardless of partisan preferences, a tad more grounded in empirics.

Can I just say I wish the pundits and national media types would be as quick and forthright in confronting climate science denial? But of course, the difference is that most reporters don't understand climate science, while the concept of calling people up and asking them who they are going to vote for is a little easier to wrap your mind around. And again, as we saw with Todd Akin's comments, the immediate and obvious connection between the ideological worldview to the facts being denied helps people see deniers for what they are. The polls are brutally discouraging to my candidate = I deny the polls; the most scrupulous practitioner of journalistic false balance has got to be able to connect the dots on that one.

Five denier memes for 2012

In 2012, deniers will still not be Galileo

What denialist tropes will the cool kids be pushing in 2012?

All the golden oldies will remain in heavy rotation, including slandering scientists, "there's been cooling/no warming for X years," and "there's no consensus." But be on the lookout for the following memes, which are focus testing in the small markets of the comment threads now:

1. It's way too small to make a difference.

Notes: Deploying this strategy is as simple as minimizing something by comparing it to something vast. The fallacy is that instead of comparing cost to benefit, the denier compares a tiny instance to a world-spanning, expensive view of the whole, which is relevant only if someone is claiming that instance will address a whole issue by itself (no one ever is).

It's use is as simple as dividing X by Y. For example, if Jo Nova sadistically murdered eight children, that would be merely an insignificant 0.000000115% of the world's people.

Usable on almost anything the denier wants to dismiss; the emissions caused by the Keystone XL's dirty oil, the Greenland ice lost in a single melting season; the contribution to the grid of a single wind farm.

2. It's too late to do anything.

This is the next logical fail back position after "It's not warming" and "We're not causing it" and "It won't be bad." Expect it to surge among the more refined "skeptics," who are still subject to embarrassment when their original line of bull has been shredded.


3. Misrepresenting the world.

Note: Watch out for the sentence beginning "India and China will never . . . ." What follows is almost always an exercise in wishful thinking.

4. God save the white race!

I'm getting a really loathsome, racist vibe off of a lot of deniers these days. I'm not sure why this is making a comeback on the right. More marginalized, less inhibited?

5. Equating inaction with the success of their arguments.

 Deniers are less important than people concerned about inaction think, and much less important than they think they are. They cast themselves (and sometimes we, their opponents, collude in this) as the primary reason the world has not taken action to fight climate change, but here's what we know:

* Denialists have, through two years of relentlessly promoting the fake scandal "Climategate," left 75% of the public blissfully unaware of their anger and striving. 75% of Americans have never heard of "Climategate."

* Those that vehemently deny global warming consistently poll between 10-15% of the public. Of those, less than 5% admit to ever posting a comment about the subject online. So the highly visible fringe of the denialist movement represents a small minority of a small minority, talking mostly back and forth to each other. When they tell you more and more people are flocking to their banner, laugh.

* It's no mystery why Americans and the rest of the world haven't taken the right steps to fight global warming, the steps everyone is going to wish had been taken sixty years from now. It's a long-term problem. Is our political system good at those? It requires a certain degree of scientific literacy just to wrap your mind around it. Is that one of our strong points?


Special bonus prediction: Combining memes 1-4, 2012 will see a surge in the "Our emissions don't matter; the global South's emissions will soon dwarf ours." (Not true, poorer countries emission are important and will become the majority of emissions, but rich countries will maintain a large minority share but when has that ever stopped them?)

Happy New Year

The Year of the Dragon

My head is full of lists and year-end summaries and such, but my schedule is full of real work, so it will have to wait, but welcome to 2012.

It's going to be hot. It's an election year in the USA (and in France, Russia, Finland and elsewhere) so expect to hear a lot of nonsense talked about the climate, and not a lot of sense. Don't despair. The world will take action to combat climate change, for a simple reason -- unlike the plight of the homeless or conflict in the Middle East or hunger in Africa, climate change, despite being one of those problems people just want to ignore, affects everybody, and is going to get worse and worse until even the most short-sighted (well, most of them) see the need for action.

By then, you say, it will be too late? Maybe, but, then, by most objective definitions, it has been too late for some time. Too late to avoid radically transforming the climate. Too late to avoid melting the permafrost. Too late to avoid drought in the Amazon and the crumbling of the WAIS into the sea.

But it will never be too late to pick ourselves up and stop making things worse. It seems like 2012 will not be the year we stop nibbling around the edges of the problem with tiny subsides and minimal regulation, but who knows the future, especially in politics -- I certainly don't.

In 2012 at IT we will continue to watch the science, watch the deniers, and on the basis of that reporting, advocate strongly for real action to combat global warming. We won't exaggerate, we won't demonize, we won't give way to hysteria; those are unhelpful responses. But we will be heard and we will be here, with no retiring or taking a blogging break or moving on to some other hobbyhorse. We'll be here in 2012, and onward, until the world has well and truly changed course.