Nate Silver interviews the guy behind the dubious “How Obama Got Elected” smear campaign with predictable results.
ALSO, you should check out this profile of Ziegler by David Foster Wallace from a few years ago in The Atlantic.
Nate Silver interviews the guy behind the dubious “How Obama Got Elected” smear campaign with predictable results.
ALSO, you should check out this profile of Ziegler by David Foster Wallace from a few years ago in The Atlantic.

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Wow. I thought people like that only existed in comments on blogs. What a freak.
Best line: “How do you have this website?” Jealous much, Ziegler?
Hilarity ensues. Your modern Republican party: Classy as ever.
Yesterday it was a Republican intiative. Today it is a smear campaign.
What will it be tomorrow, a conservative movement?
Good grief.
Does Silver admit that he doesn’t really know what a push poll is? Because several liberal blogs are using him as verification that it was one.
What a sweetheart.
Does Silver admit that he doesn’t really know what a push poll is?
What actually constitutes a push poll is controversial. Yesterday, Nate had a very good analysis for the grounds in which this constitutes a push poll. But you it is very difficult to come up with a single set of criteria that identifies all things that would be considered a push poll. You have to do it case-by-case, which is what Nate did a good job of yesterday.
Well, in retrospect, most smear campaigns and Republican initiatives tend to be indistinguishable.
Let’s all point and laugh at Dennis, getting cheeto stains on the keyboard trying to convince is that the operator of the most successful election analysis site going, which became a go-to site for analysts from CNN to Fox News, doesn’t know what a push poll is.
To quote the estimable TBogg,
I love that he admits, right up front, that he has no control group, and then says if anyone wants to disprove his claims they’ll have to pay for one themselves.
I also love all the “Oh, you will never have the balls to print this” taunting. Like he legitimately believes he’s coming across as sympathetic and Silver’s the ignorant bully with an axe to grind.
Other highlights: the part where he says he’s not racist because a black woman works for him; the strawman at the end where he says “Not everything in the New York Times is true and not everything Sean Hannity says is false,” as if anyone is claiming either of those things.
I went and looked at where this “Nate does not know what a push poll” meme that Dennis referred to is coming from. It appears to come from several highly-partisan commenters on Nate’s site who have an incredibly narrow (and misguided) definition of what a push poll is. To quote a response to Mark Adams, one of these partisans:
Second, the question of whether this is a push poll depends on how broad one’s definition of a push-poll is. In a narrow sense, no, this was not intended to sway potential voters in an upcoming election. In a broader sense, though, this was VERY obviously not intended merely to uncover information but to make a particular point. That is, the poll was skewed to produce an outcome to be used for political purposes, and is therefore not legitimate. If you look at the survey, several of the questions have all the candidates listed as possibilities while others don’t. Many of the questions are intentionally worded in a way to produce ambiguous results while others are clearly worded to produce much more obvious results. This doesn’t even come close to approximating a survey that an unbiased pollster who simply wanted to know about media influence would ever create.
Push polling is not limited to swaying voter sentiment. It is a term that exists outside of electoral polling, but polling in general. Under the more general criteria, this is most certainly a push poll.
Scaifetards being Scaifetards
If Silver didn’t publish the transcript, he’d be proving his cowardice, but if he did publish it, he’d be doing exactly what Ziegler wants! An inescapable dilemma if ever there was one. Clearly this John Ziegler will go down in history as one of the great strategic masterminds of the 21st century!
“Good grief.”
You said it, Dennis. I really don’t understand why anyone takes idiots like Ziegler seriously.
Essentially, Ziegler has a thesis that the reason Obama won was because his supporters were misinformed by a compliant media.
He then attempts to prove this thesis by conducting a poll in which Obama supporters, and no one else, are asked questions about facts that Ziegler thinks they should have known in order to make an informed decision.
The assumption here is that if these people had just been given this information by the mainstream media, they would not have voted for Obama. If this is not Ziegler’s assumption then his whole thesis is meaningless.
Of course, not only are many of his “facts” dubious, simply knowing these particular facts may or may not may have had any impact on someone’s decision to vote for Obama.
For instance, I knew that the Dems controlled congress, that Biden had been accused of plagiarism, that one of Obama’s earliest campaign events took place at Ayers home, that right wing blogs had gone nuts about his supposed desire to bankrupt the coal industry and that Tina Fey, not Sarah Palin, had said she could see Alaska from her house.
I was in possession of all this information, culled from the MSM, SNL, blogs, talk radio etc. and I still voted for Obama. Why? Because the information that Ziegler thinks is so important, I thought was either utter horse shit or totally irrelevant. I voted for Obama because of what I knew about his proposed policies and what I saw of his temperment and management skills on the campaign trail. Knowing that he was once a guest in the Ayers home was completely meaningless to me.
So just having access to or knowing the information Zeigler thinks is so important, then, means nothing. What about single issue voters who only care about one issue, such as abortion. Obama is pro-choice and McCain is pro-life. No way a serious pro-choicer is going to vote for McCain just because Joe Biden was once accused of plagiarism. In fact, a voter like that, once they knew where the candidates stood on their single issue, probably wouldn’t pay much attention or care about other information no matter how often it was repeated on the MSM.
So again, simply knowing ths or that set of information, says nothing about why people voted for Obama. It’s how people judge and weigh that information which is important.
In other words, Zeigler’s thesis is obviously, ridiculously faulty on its face. Paying for a Zogby poll doesn’t make it any less so.
As Rheinhard said, “Let’s all point and laugh at Dennis.”
Because, really, it never gets old.
fafaroo FTW.
fafaroo,
I think you are missing part of Ziegler’s point. He’s saying that the media was biased in Obama’s favor, and therefore played up negative stuff about McCain/Palin.
But let’s start picking apart these questions…
Ziegler question: “Which candidate said they could see Russia from their house?”
Palin interview:
GIBSON: What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?
PALIN: They’re our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.
But Ziegler thought he was measuring the “Tina Fey effect” if people responding to the poll remembered it as “can see Russia from my house” instead of “can see Russia from land here in Alaska.”
Ziegler question: “Which candidate won their first election by getting all of their opponents kicked off the ballot?”
He only counted “Obama” as a right answer to this question, even though the correct answer actually is “None.” (71% of respondents answer “None” or “Not sure.”) Obama ran against and beat his Republican opponent (Rosette Caldwell) in the 1996 race for an IL senate seat, his first election. He got the Chicago Sun-Times endorsement (see “Our endorsements for Illinois Senate,” Oct 27, 1996). His opponents in the Democratic primary — which I’d hoped we all learned, in this year’s practical civics lesson, is not the same as an election — were disqualified for irregularities in their petition signatures to get on the primary ballot.
“Which candidate said their policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket?”
This was a news story that broke on Nov. 2 — two days before the election — when many Obama supporters had already voted in early voting and no longer were paying a lot of attention to the news. In contrast, none of the questions about McCain/Palin were of news stories that broke any later than Oct. 22.
Also, the quote is inaccurate; Obama said that someone building new coal plants likely would be bankrupted by the cap-and-trade system (McCain, incidentally, also supports cap-and-trade, but this was not a poll about voters’ knowledge about the issues and politicians’ stances on them). Technically, a coal-based power company wouldn’t be bankrupted by building a new plant if they offered genuine “clean coal,” i.e. had reduced emissions at their existing plants such that new plants could be built and keep within the “cap.” However, the fact is that there is no coal that clean yet. The low-hanging fruit of reduced emissions already has been plucked for most American power plants; further reductions are going to take significant investments in new technology and construction.
It’s actually an interesting poll nonetheless, but not precisely because of what it tells us about media influence. It actually has more to do with how candidates talk about each other.
The “Weather Underground” question confused respondents because McCain and Palin didn’t specify the group to which Ayers and Dohrn belonged (and the group itself is alternately styled the “Weathermen” during its early years and “Weather Underground” after the Darwinistic townhouse explosion). If the question had been asked as “Which candidate has been associated with a domestic terrorist?” I bet the number of people answering “Obama” would have been above 75%.
Note that on a question that did precisely capture how McCain/Palin talked about Obama — “Which candidate said that the government should redistribute the wealth?” — there was an 81% correct answer rate, the same rate for the question about which candidate was unsure how many houses s/he had. The Obama campaign had played on McCain’s uncertainty in campaign rhetoric to show that he economically was out of touch, just as the McCain campaign played on Obama’s comment to show that Obama was a socialist.
The 57 states and plagiarism questions are ridiculous. The first was a verbal typo Obama made when exhausted by campaigning (in context it’s clear he meant 47), and it didn’t get picked up by the McCain campaign, so it didn’t reach a mass audience. The second is about something that happened in 1987, when an entire generation of Obama voters were either not yet born or just learning to read newspaper articles. I am too old to be Generation Obama, but even so in 1987 I wasn’t following which candidates were dropping out of the Democratic race months before Iowa.
A further disparity between the questions asked about McCain/Palin, and those asked about Obama/Biden — the ones about McCain/Palin all were about things that occurred in 2008: her wardrobe, her daughter, her Russia comments, his forgetfulness about his houses. (There were no historical questions about, say, the Keating scandal or the Wasilla sports complex.)
The questions about Obama and Biden were tilted toward their backgrounds: a 1987 plagiarism, a 1995 coffee at the Ayers/Dohrn house, the 1996 13th district state Senate Democratic primary. Correct answers required respondents not only to have been keeping abreast of current events, but also to have researched the candidate’s histories. The only “current events” questions about Obama/Biden were the 57 states, coal and generated crisis questions.
faf, your generosity never fails to amaze. The rest of us take every word you wrote to be self-evident and beyond the need for explication. Still, you offered Dennis a simple and complete analysis of the stinking pile behind Mr. Ziegler’s barn.
A saint, that’s what you are.
fafaroo – while I certainly agree with you about Ziegler’s study being bullshit, if I wanted to I could rationalize a justification that he may be trying to do something else in a backwards way.
What Ziegler wants us to believe is that the great majority of Obama voters were ignorant morons who, if only they’d been properly informed about Obama’s nefariousness, would have voted differently. I think your explanation points out why this is total nonsense.
But suppose a small fraction of the electorate are the “misinformed ignorants” he wants us to imagine? is there a scenario where if, say, 1% of voters in a few locations changed their votes then the electoral map would switch to McCain?
Maybe but I certainly don’t think that’s what he’s trying to show either (especially since he interviewed only blacks). And of course, like what you said, even if he is trying to argue that, if only a few percent of uninformed voters heard what an SOB Obama is then McCain should have won, the fact that he depends on such a small sensitive population is demolished by the fact he refused to have a control group and see how many “misinformed ignorants” might have changed their vote if given more information about, say, the Keating 5 or Palin’s temper tantrums.
if he did publish it, he’d be doing exactly what Ziegler wants!
Soooo, Ziegler wants the world to know what a dick he is? Clever.
PG is my hero.
Like most of you here, I could probably ace the majority of those questions and I went ahead and voted for him anyway. What do you suppose that tells Mr. Ziegler?
Duros – what it tells Mr. Ziegler is we’re not his intended audience, which is mainly people who have spent the last 2 weeks whining that “It’s not fair that everybody isn’t forced to watch FOX News all the time! Then they’d know Obama was a secret Muslim terrorist socialist and we’d have President Palin! Waaaaah!!”
I think you are missing part of Ziegler’s point. He’s saying that the media was biased in Obama’s favor, and therefore played up negative stuff about McCain/Palin.
So what? Even if they were, simply having heard or not heard the information is only the first part of proving his thesis, such as it is.
Zeigler should have followed up his first questions with, “If you had heard that Biden/Obama were plagiarists/pals with terrorists/socialists /etc. would it have changed your vote?”
He didn’t follow up with this question probably because he didn’t want to have someone on camera saying “No. What fucking difference does any of that crap that make?”
Certainly, some percentage of people might change their vote on hearing that Obama may have had a few canapes in the Ayer’s living room. But simply determining whether people knew this “fact” or not is not the way to prove how many people would have, let alone, that this would have been a decisive number of people.
It’s easy to come up with a definition and metric for measuring the amount of negative coverage that one candidate or another received.
How the specific stories that made up that coverage, however, swayed someone’s vote or not is far more difficult to judge with any accuracy.
Again, I heard every single negative story about Obama/Biden that Zeigler’s complaining weren’t covered enough, including a few that he isn’t complaining about, and it didn’t sway my vote in the least. I heard a lot of negative shit about McCain too which really only reinforced my decision. But was there some piece of positive news about McCain that, if I had heard it, would have changed my mind? I can honestly say, fuck no.
How exactly do you measure that attitude in a poll that only wants to find out what I knew, instead of how I weighed and judged what I knew?
what it tells Mr. Ziegler is we’re not his intended audience,
Well, yeah, but we knew that already. He needs Zogby to tell him that? I could’a done that for half whatever he paid in cash.
“Does Silver admit that he doesn’t really know what a push poll is? Because several liberal blogs are using him as verification that it was one.”
Style over substance fallacy. You are ignoring the substance of the argument and instead attacking one term that was used.
“Well, yeah, but we knew that already. He needs Zogby to tell him that? I could’a done that for half whatever he paid in cash.”
He needed Zogby’s good name to give his bullshit poll weight.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
…what it tells Mr. Ziegler is we’re not his intended audience, which is mainly people who have spent the last 2 weeks whining that ‘It’s not fair that everybody isn’t forced to watch FOX News all the time! …’
Exactly. This guy is going to make a cheap as film, self-distribute it as a dvd via the web and hope he makes some fast, easy cash from people who want to reinforce their own world view during a moment of uncertainty.
This is not a phenomenon that is unique to the right, but this instance of it seems particularly obvious and crass.
This is just another attempt to explain Obama’s victory in a manner that doesn’t require the right to make any changes in their views. I’ve heard any number of these, from “McCain wasn’t really a conservative” to “Obama actually campaigned as a conservative.” People on the right want to believe that Obama voters were duped into voting for him (either because they’re stupid or because of some kind of media bias) because otherwise it would suggest that a majority of Americans actually agree with his stated views. In the minds of the right wing, this conclusion has to be wrong. There MUST be some other explanation, and I’m sure we’re going to spend the next four years hearing lots of different ones.
Aren’t Republicans supposed to be re-building their party and brand right now after getting their asses whipped?
(icruise beat me to it. As long as Repugs are wallowing in this stuff, it’s time spent _not_ getting their party back on track. And this makes me happy, as it guarantees their permanent minority status as a regional religious fundamentalist party.)
He needed Zogby’s good name to give his bullshit poll weight.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
I’ll bet Mr. Zogby is laughing too.
the truth hurts!
“I’ll bet Mr. Zogby is laughing too.”
As long as Ziegler’s cheque doesn’t bounce, and this poll gets him on Fox News, I bet he is laughing.
fafaroo,
So what? Even if they were, simply having heard or not heard the information is only the first part of proving his thesis, such as it is.
Zeigler should have followed up his first questions with, “If you had heard that Biden/Obama were plagiarists/pals with terrorists/socialists /etc. would it have changed your vote?”
I don’t follow this. If what he wants to prove is that the media overplayed negative info on McCain/Palin, and underplayed negative info on Obama/Biden, then it’s irrelevant whether knowing the information about Obama would have changed the vote for the specific voter. For some people, media bias is bad even if it doesn’t have an easily-measured effect on voting.
… then it’s irrelevant whether knowing the information about Obama would have changed the vote for the specific voter. For some people, media bias is bad even if it doesn’t have an easily-measured effect on voting.
PG, we disagree then on what Ziegler says he wants to prove. If he isn’t arguing that media bias had a measurable and specific effect on voting in the 2009 presidential election, what the hell is he arguing?
Minnesota Recount: Team Franken glad their supporters are uneducated?
Looks like even Democrats want to partake in this initiative and smear campaign to portray their voters as ill-informed idiots .
Franken should be expecting a very angry blog post on this from Nate Silver. After he does his research first this time.
Thanks for the link Dennis.
From the article Special Ed cites:
“They’re new voters and immigrants. They’ve been brought in by groups like ACORN, from the inner cities. They’re more likely to make mistakes. I’ve bounced this off of minority people, and they agree with me.””
Then this turd of wisdom kicks up from Ed’s Hot Air litter box:
“Is he admitting that Franken and ACORN enticed non-citizens to vote?”
Some people just need to be put down.
“I’ve bounced this off of minority people, and they agree with me.”
I love these iterations of My One Black Friend Says.
On the way in to work this morning, I heard Limbaugh refer to the Ziegler/Zogby poll on his radio show. He presented it as definitive PROOF that Obama supporters did not know the truth about their candidate. To paraphrase, he said, “We know what Obama is going to do, all you have to do is listen to what he says. But his supporters don’t know what he plans to do. There’s this new poll by … ” etc.
Limbaugh used the poll exactly as Ziegler intends it to be used: to attack Obama supporters for not knowing the truth about their candidate and the media for keeping that truth from voters. It’s got nothing really to do with the media portrayal of John McCain. It’s all about what Obama supporters did or did not know about Obama.
Ultimately, Ziegler believes that had voters been giving the truth about Obama, they would not have voted for him, and so there really is no mandate for Obama’s plans and policies. They are not really what people voted for because they did not have the whole story.
This is the crux of the argument because Ziegler’s larger purpose here is to undermine the legitimacy of Obama’s support and hence his agenda — that and sell a bunch of cheap ass DVDs.
Last night I finally made it all the way through the 10 minute video clip at Ziegler’s site. It ends with an Obama supporter confessing that she may not be as informed as she thought she was but that on learning Biden was accused of plagiarism or that Obama had all his opponents kicked off the ballot in his first election, she would not have changed her vote.
To Ziegler, this is a horrifying admission. It is not rational to him that one could both know about Bill Ayers and vote for Obama. To do so reveals everything about the irrationality at the core of Obama’s support.
Ziegler’s attitude here is exactly what Nate Silver describes in his follow up to his Ziegler interview:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/did-talk-radio-kill-conservatism.html
In Ziegler’s mind, all one has to know about Obama is that he once attended a fundraising event in the house of Bill Ayers. He cannot comprehend a world in which most people don’t give a shit. Indeed, he cannot even comprehend a world in which one should even have to make the case for why it matters! Can’t these people see?!?!?! IT JUST DOES!!!!
At any rate, Ziegler is a buffoon. I can’t believe i’ve just wasted so much time on this.
Quaker, I’m not a saint, just a really bad procrastinator.
“There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.”
In fairness, this is exactly what I have heard conservatives say about liberals on many issues, particularly moral ones like same-sex marriage. And at least for me, it’s somewhat true; I can *believe* that some people consider having two different kinds of genitalia in each marriage to be the raison d’etre of the institution, I just am surprised that such people can function in our modern society. I am not sure how to go about persuading people who think “It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” is a clever rationale for their position.
As for why conservatives think the Bill Ayers issue is important, let’s condense:
Bill Ayers was himself involved in acts of property destruction, and led a group that attempted to kill people (cf. the nail bomb to be used at a military dance; the bombing of a judge’s home; etc.). He dedicated a book in part to RFK’s assassin. He has stated his regret that people got hurt physically in anything in which he was involved (see, e.g. his and Dohrn’s apology to Richard Elrod, who was injured in the Days of Rage rioting). Most voters would say his acts were morally condemnable and that he himself, by failing to admit that those acts were wrong, is a morally bad person in this respect. (I think people can be morally bad in one way yet good in another; for example, Cindy McCain’s rhetoric about Obama was morally bad politicking, but she seems to be morally praiseworthy in her concern for less fortunate people in developing countries.)
Conservatives therefore say that Obama showed bad judgment in associating with Ayers for various purposes: for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the Woods Fund, reading and praising Ayers’s book on juvenile justice, using Ayers’s house as a site to meet politically active people in the neighborhood. There is a range of opinion on this: Charles Krauthammer thinks anyone who ever shook Ayers’s hand is an indecent person; people with a stronger grip on their sanity are content to say that such poor judgment may be acceptable in a college president but not in our nation’s president.
The sane conservatives therefore HAVE said why they think the Ayers association is important. They have to some extent tried to persuade. What they keep hitting their heads against is that people who voted for Obama just didn’t think it was as important as the conservatives did. In the 2008 election’s choice between supposedly poor judgment on people at whose home to have coffee, and proven poor judgment about the war in Iraq (with regard to both Clinton and McCain) and economic policy (McCain), the voters decided to risk that Obama might have coffee at some jerk’s house, rather than to risk that Clinton or McCain would start a war of aggression in Iran.
Oh SNAP!