Why Right-Wingers Need Skewed Polls Conspiracy Theory for Romney to Win - And Even More If He Loses
There could be (and probably is) a very sinister side to the big right-wing poll denials.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-right-wingers-need-skewed-polls-conspiracy-theory-romney-win-and-even-more-if
In the alternate universe occupied by the right, there’s a dark conspiracy afoot -- one in which the steadfast conservative exists in an undulating world that conspires to confound him with unwelcome information: his big car is melting the polar ice caps, women are bringing home the bacon and, four years ago, a black man won the presidency, fair and square. Information that so disturbs challenges his comfort level must surely be wrong.
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To those of the paranoid, xenophobic mindset first identified by Richard Hofstadter in the 1960s, it’s hardly a stretch to believe it when they’re told that the very polls that are used by media to assess the state of political contests are skewed to favor the liberal candidate, especially when the candidate is a black man named Obama.
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The number one reason for the “skewed polls” narrative is, as mentioned earlier, the need to create a high level of right-wing turnout in early voting and on election day. And if Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, working alongside other powerhouse groups such as the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, manages to exceed expectations in the turnout of right-wing voters, Reed will have created a self-fulfilling prophecy. (See? The polling models were wrong.) Fair enough.
But there are benefits to be gained, as well, from the evolution of a theory to a conspiracy. If the media are believed to have deliberately over-sampled Democrats in their polling, then any suppression of Democratic votes, particularly among non-whites (which has become job one of a significant portion of the red-state legislative class) will be easily dismissed in the right’s Milky-White Way galaxy as left-wing hysteria.
Most chillingly, should Romney lose the election, the result of such a conspiracy theory will be to cast doubt on the outcome of the election itself, reinforcing the false notion, ever popular on the right, that the presidency of Barack Obama is not constitutionally legitimate. In the mind of the unhinged, as AlterNet's Joshua Holland suggests, that’s a license to violence.