How can Bush Still have these Kinds of Suport Numbers????????????

[sventvkg]

I just don't get it..Who are these people that support this administrations policies and the things that have happened in 3 years as a result of them????????? I believe these poles have to incorrect because I have not spoked with anyone or even overheard anyone saying anything favorable about his administration...So, Besides, UTAH, where the hell are all these POD people???? Do they really exist? I can not face the prospect of another 4 years of this administration..It will take years to repair the damage as it is, and if elected another term, our government and people may well be bankrupt...Here is the link and if you can help me understand these questions I would be eternally greatful.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7030-2003Sep13.html

[pasadenaboy]

1. Pollls only interview

people who don't have caller ID, and actually answer the phone. I have so many telemarketers, if someone called me for a poll, they could probably never get through to me.

So, I think polls are not very accurate, because they only get the segment of society that will put up with them, which is usually less technologically sophisticated and more conservative. Remember how all the polls were showing W with a 5% lead the days before the 2000 election?

[Booberdawg]

2. I don't understand it either

But remember most of the electorate are not as informed as we are here.

Even so, sometimes I feel like they must be rigged to even consider putting up with this MORON:tinfoilhat:

[Andy_Stephenson]

3. Polling courtesy of

[Clete]

4. Yeah, they didn't say who took the poll unless I missed it.

I mean you can throw out any figures you want and if there is no reference or source, it seems to me it would be meaningless.

[Kazak]

5. 100% of poll results...

are generated by people who bother to participate in polls.

[lostnfound]

6. Somedays I think they all work in my office...

just kidding. But in a sea of W 2004 stickers, I sometimes think I should invite them one at a time into my office and ask them to explain in detail why they support Bush, and actually do nothing but listen to them. You know, like an anthropological study to understand the great apes (or the lesser apes).

I suspect that just hearing themselves in a quiet slightly intimidating environment would be enough for the cracks to appear.

Here's a quote that contains a possible answer:
"People defend nothing more violently than the pretenses they live by."
-- Allen Drury

[Resistance Is Futile]

7. People are idiots

Give the people a choice between a doubt-free warm fuzzy fiction and the cold hard facts of reality and they'll choose the fiction every time. The junta provides a fiction. Everyone else is at least attempting to argue on the basis of reality.

No candidate will ever pass Shrub in the polls unless they can come up with a warm fuzzy fiction that's even more compelling than Shrub's. Running on reality is a sucker's game.

[lynndew2]

8. Time for me to get Flamed

Shrub, Like it or not, has shown security here at home. I know you and I dont ever want to give credit to the fact that we havent even been seriously threatend since 9/11/01. It is a fact. The economy is slowly coming around as any economist with merit would have told you. It runs in cycles and the government normally doesnt(cant) do much either way. The reasons people like * are true issues and you all need to see that if you want US to move ahead.
When I watch the debates all I hear is bush bashing and that will NOT win anything. I hear a few canidates make promises. Empty for the most part cause they dont really offer ways to pay for them. Repeal the tax cut, leave Iraq, whatever it takes to give everyone whatever they want.
Cut military funding, CIA funding, FBI funding. Oh yeah we tryed that. Then 9/11/01 happened.
OUR canidates NEED to talk about homeland security and having a strong military in general.
If they dont the shrub will rest his head in the WH for another 4 years.

I havent decided who to back as of now, It will be whoever the dem canidate is.

[janx]

9. We tend to forget that it's still very early. Most people don't

even start to pay attention until after the primaries.

There's a new Newsweek poll out (I think it's new). While some freepers thought Chimpy buried Gov. Dean and Senator Clinton in this poll, I didn't read it that way:


http://www.pollingreport.com/wh04gen.htm


Given the fact that it's so early, and given the 10% undecided factor, it didn't look like a landslide for the Chimpster by any means.

[Lexingtonian]

10. vanity rather than imagination

I think you probably don't talk with enough elderly people, or rural ones. There is this weird phenomenon of "trust", of 'there's someone just like everyone I knew 30-40 years ago as President' and that being a reason to stop thinking for oneself and to go along with this magical journey through Oz. No, it's not a happy journey- Dorothy's wasn't either, really- but they just *know* that the magic will hold up in the end. Those magical slippers will take them back to Kansas, there will be a Good Witch with the simple instructions of twirling and clicking one's heels after all. But a pretty good number have walked off or found the end of the Yellow Brick Road already, where it's all brambles.

What W is doing in political practice is that he's grasping for and then grinding down every single large chunk of conservative bias (aka 'benefit of the doubt') remaining within the liberal and swing voter populations. He's getting to where he's grinding down bits of stuff needed to appease conservative voters too. I personally don't mind his burning up of these hidden reserves of political 'capital' but I am surprised at how large it once must have been and hope that he runs low or runs out in the next couple of months.

Sadly he seems to have found a new chunk somewhere in the past week or two, so his numbers have stalled unusually after the free fall in late August. There's some new confident-sounding talk emanating from the direction of the Christian Right, talk invoking their pseudo-martyrdom conceit rather than their triumphalist conceit. It should give the Bush people another month, maybe two, then collapse and take another five or six percentage points with it. (The Christian Right isn't really into suffering though it puts up quite a show of the pretense. It has never been in the business of real suffering- more so into domination, its opposite- and few of its adherents will get into it now.)

In short, yes. They live in a different mental reality. It requires a lot of upkeep and not trusting the empirical, let along the intellectual, and overinterpreting what little factual evidence they do have in their favor to bolster the myths they cannot let go of. And in the Manichaean situation of the present- they are to become a minority belief system and without domination for the first time since 1700 or so- they struggle not to lose hold on reality altogether. Their psychotic breaks are sorta predictable and common these days (though after the third or fourth one, there isn't any news for a liberal to it anymore).

[sandnsea]

11. Been at the mall all summer

... or they can't afford their cable and internet bill so they have no information except the 6:00 news. And we all know they're a bunch of liberal liars.

We have to tell them in the friendliest, funniest way possible. President Clinton said it today, actually he asked us to because not 5% of the people really know what's going on. So let's just keep our chins up and go to it!