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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7810 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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This is the question I always have in mind when I see ideologues of any stripe popularize poll numbers that show their preferred candidate for an upcoming election in the lead and denigrate polls that show the opposite. There's certainly a "celebrate the home team winning" aspect that I understand - when the Red Sox have a good record or have a big lead against the other team, I, too, like to remind other Red Sox fans of this if the context is appropriate, and we both have a positive experience from it.

But unlike professional sports, elections are things that the fans actually have pretty direct input on the outcome of. So one would think that a committed fan of a particular politician or party would try to behave in a way as to increase the odds of their preferred team winning. Which, I think, would lead one to the exact opposite of the abovementioned behavior; present the polls that show your favorite team losing as the most dependable, most reliable polls that everyone needs to be paying attention to all the time, and present the other ones as fake and flawed and maybe even part of a conspiracy theory to keep people on your side complacent.

But I also see an argument for the opposite case, that, as one Osama Bin Laden said, IIRC, "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they instinctively side with the strong horse." So presenting your favored politician as "stronger" in the polls could actually lead other people into learning that they genuinely, in good faith, agree with that politician's ideology, and thus they become more likely to vote for them.

I admit I haven't looked hard, but I've yet to see any empirical evidence for which factor is stronger and by how much. As it is, the fact that it feels really really good to celebrate your favorite team politician being in the lead (certainly it feels far better than "celebrating" the opposite) makes me highly skeptical of any evidence or arguments that such celebration also conveniently helps your favorite team politician win in the upcoming election.

Or they might feel “it is a lost cause” so why bother voting

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