From Mark Crispin Miller:Polls now tell us that Americans claim to have voted for Barack Obama by far larger margins thanthose indicated on Election Day.
Officially, Obama won the popular vote by 53%, with John McCain and Sarah Palin taking 46%--a lead of seven points. But according to what people told the pollsters at the Wall Street Journal, Obama seems to have prevailed by eleven points: 50%-39%. And the New York Times reports that people claim to have voted for Obama by some 28 points, 60%-32%.
Thus Obama's win was not a mere "decisive victory," as all the press (and he) agreed. It was a landslide, like in 1932, with the Republicans not just refuted but completely routed.
Now, here in what we might call "the real world," such disparities make perfect sense, since they reflect the fact that millions of Americans were variously disenfranchised on Election Day, just as they'd been throughout the decade.
But out in the Bizarro Universe constructed by the US press, those startling polls cannot mean that millions of Americans were disenfranchised by the GOP, since no Americans were disenfranchised (although some few surely were affected, here and there, by "computer glitches").
Not a bit of it! Rather, what those polls suggest, as Slate's Christopher Beam asserts below, is that people are simply lying--a "fact" without a shred of evidence to back it up.
A sample of Beam's logic:
Are people really lying about having voted for Obama? Yes, they are. It's common for more people to claim they voted for a president than actually did. In the 1930s, George Gallup found that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was more popular in post-election polls than he was on Election Day. The same was true after the 2000 election, in which George W. Bush lost the popular vote. By 2004, polls showed Bush having won in a landslide.
So Gallup said that "more people claimed to (have) voted for" FDR than really did? Or did he simply find that Roosevelt "was more popular in post-election polls than he was on Election Day"?
And then, as further "evidence" that people lie about their votes, Beam argues, weirdly, that "the same was true after the 2000 election," since Bush lost that contest--then "won in a landslide" four years later.
What?
What "landslide"? Even the official outcome had Bush "winning" by 3 million votes. In any case, how do those (alleged) Bush votes serve the argument that "people (are) really lying about voting for Obama"?
Without pausing to explain, Beam then notes that the gap between these new polls and the (seeming) outcome on Election Day is so wide that (what we might call) the Lying Thesis can't account for it entirely. And so Beam spins through a range of further speculations to explain those gross disparities--that is, explain those gross disaprities away.
"The main explanation for the gap, say pollsters, is people who didn't vote at all saying they did." Any evidence to back that up? No way! Beam then claims that people probably just plain forgot which candidate they'd voted for, and notes as well that "people do a poor job of reporting past behaviors." Any evidence of such forgetfulness, or that anyone has "misreported" his or her own votes? None whatever!
Beam then invokes "the group of McCain voters that either regrets their pick or would rather not admit it to a pollster." This is, of course, the old"reluctant responder" hypothesis --which, pre-Election Day, was trotted out to tell us why Obama couldn't win; and now Beam's using it to tell us, tacitly, why Obama didn't really win so big. And is there any evidence for that claim? Of course not!
The reason why Beam's logic is so tortured, and why he and his editors don't see the need for any evidence to back up his fantastic claims, is that the only rational explanation for "the gap" in question is that millions of Americans were variously disenfranchised on Election Day; and that's a fact (i.e., not mere speculation) that neither Beam nor his superiors --nor most US reporters, left and right--can let themselves perceive.
For all of them, the copious and specific evidence of vote suppression and election fraud last year does not exist. Period. Their blinders keep them happily unmindful of--and, therefore, indifferent to--the millions who'd been "legally" purged from the voter rolls by BushCo's DoJ, or purged illegally by partisan administrators and/or party operatives, or kept from voting by too few machines (there having been--again--long, long, long lines in Democratic precincts only), or had their votes flipped electronically (with or without their seeing it happen), or disinformed, or misdirected, or intimidated; and so on.
Although such moves have long since been well-documented by election monitors, both individual and institutional, our press remains convinced that all of that is only so much "theory" ("conspiracy theory"). Thus they can't report what's right in front of them-- any more than they can see, or say, what also really happened in this decade's prior elections:
Chances are, Obama's landslide won't last forever. Retroactive vote reporting tends to be a proxy for popularity. Just ask George W. Bush. In a 2006 NYT poll, more people said they voted for John Kerry in 2004 than voted for Bush.
For Beam, it's just not possible--a flood of studies notwithstanding--that all those people who, in 2006, "said they voted for John Kerry" actually did vote for him. No, those people were all simply wrong--just "lying," or "forgetful," or somehow embarrassed that they hadn't voted for Bush/Cheney, and so "would rather not admit it to a pollster."
And so, as far as Slate's concerned (and Slate, remember, is a liberal site), what people say about their votes is just as unimportant as those votes themselves.
The "liberal media," in short, does not much care about, or for, democracy; and neither do the Democrats (or Pres. Obama). And so it's up to all the rest of us to face the facts about what really happened in the last election (and the ones before), or we will never, ever, get the change we voted for, and must keep fighting for.
MCM
Lies, Damn Lies, and Votes for Obama
Why do so many people say they voted for the president when they didn't?
By Christopher Beam
http://www.slate.com/id/2220803/?from=rssEven as Americans grow skeptical of various Democratic policies, President Obama's approval rating hovers at a robust 63 percent. People like him so much, in fact, that many say they voted for him-even when they didn't.
In the 2008 election, Obama won 53 percent of the votes; John McCain got 46 percent. But two new polls, conducted by the Wall Street Journal/NBC and the New York Times/CBS, show Obama winning by a much wider margin.
When respondents were asked by the WSJ whom they voted for in the 2008 presidential elections, 41 percent said they voted for Obama, compared with 32 percent for McCain. Factor out the 18 percent who said they didn't vote, and you've got Obama beating McCain by 11 points, 50 percent to 39 percent.
The gap in the New York Times poll is even wider. In it, 48 percent of respondents said they voted for Obama, compared with 25 percent for McCain. Again, subtract the 19 percent who say they didn't vote, and you've got Obama winning by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, with 60 percent to McCain's 32 percent.
What gives? Are people really lying about having voted for Obama?
Yes, they are. It's common for more people to claim they voted for a president than actually did. In the 1930s, George Gallup found that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was more popular in post-election polls than he was on Election Day. The same was true after the 2000 election, in which George W. Bush lost the popular vote. By 2004, polls showed Bush having won in a landslide. ("Polls showed"
no such thing--MCM.)
But the disparity between declared Obama voters and actual Obama voters is especially wide. The gap is usually in the single digits, and it waxes and wanes with the president's popularity. The New York Times poll, conducted periodically since Obama's inauguration, shows the gap between Obama and McCain steadily growing. In February, he led McCain 42 percent to 28 percent. In April, it was 43-25. By June, his lead had grown to 48-25. "Even by the standards of historical numbers, that's a large gap," says Adam Berinsky, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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