ACORN FAIL: 52% of GOP Conspiracists
Image by hans s via Flickr
According to a new PPP poll (PDF), “26% of Americans think ACORN stole the election for Obama last year, including 52% of Republicans.” Only 27% of Republicans say outright that Obama won the race, 21% of Republicans are undecided.
What’s interesting is that this is crazy. This was not a close election by any means — Obama won by millions of votes nationally, and there’s no state that was particularly in dispute, where election fraud could have made the difference in the Electoral College. This wasn’t 2000 and the Florida recount. This wasn’t even 2004, with the conspiracy theories about Ohio. This was 2008, when Barack Obama beat John McCain — after leading comfortably in the polls throughout virtually all of the campaign — in a relative landslide (relative to 2000 and 2004, that is).
And, yet, an anti-ACORN conspiracy theory has this much currency in the GOP? Now, one can question whether this is the most rigorous poll. But given the ludicrousness of the claim being tested, it shouldn’t be polling at better than… what? 3%?
The Monkey Cage points to the numbers after the 2000 recount. Then, according to a Newsweek poll (scroll down), 56% of Democrats considered Bush illegitimate. But that was in December of 2000, after a lengthy, nation-dividing recount that eventually featured a Republican-dominated Supreme Court declaring the Republican the victor. One can argue about the merits of that decision, but it’s more than understandable that a large percentage of Democrats might consider George W. Bush illegitimate — a similar number of Republicans surely would have felt the same way had Gore been declared the victor by a Democrat-dominated court (which, uh, happened at the state-court level).
But, in a completely non-disputed election, a year later, we’ve got almost as many Republicans (52% vs. 56%), believing that Barack Obama is illegitimate? Based on what? Glenn Beck’s imagination? Fox News bloviating? Low IQ?
It’s bizarre to say the least. But what does it really mean? Part of it seems to be that the last decade has turned “illegitimate” into the new cool political slur — right up there with dishonest or corrupt or unpatriotic. For some reason, the new response to the opposing party winning is to claim they really didn’t — that, instead, they must have cheated.
Where does this come from? I think one possible culprit would have to be false consensus bias — our innate tendency to think that whatever we think must be what other people think. There couldn’t possibly be that many people who supported the other guy, thus something must be hinky. Of course, we’ve had this bias since the beginning of time (or, at least, the beginning of human politics), so why does it seem so much worse now?
For that, I really don’t have an answer. Perhaps we misunderestimate the extent to which earlier elections were considered stolen by partisans. Ever since the first contested presidential election in America, Adams-Jefferson, there has been a certain amount of ill-will in the wake of the ballot casting. Perhaps, had we had modern polling since the nation’s inception, we’d find a tremendous amount of this kind of thing throughout the decades.
My intuition, though, is that this has gotten worse in the 2000s. Partly, that’s because we’ve had such close elections. Both 2000 and 2004 were close enough to justify some amount of paranoia. Now, perhaps, the Republicans are paying back the Democratic conspiracy mongering of the last decade with their own childishness. ACORN is the GOP’s Diebold, maybe. “Barack Obama is illegitimate,” is the Republicans’ version of “George W. Bush is going to suspend elections in 2008 and seize power as a dictator.” The difference, though, would seem to be how widespread this stuff is. I haven’t seen good polling on how many Democrats bought into the crazier theories during the Bush years, but it couldn’t possibly have been this widespread. Could it have?
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by stevesilberman, ryansager. ryansager said: ACORN FAIL: 52% of GOP believe group stole election for Obama. Why?: http://bit.ly/1X6QU2 [...]
Mr. Sager,
I believe that there are two key elements to this situation.
1) Conservatives in general and Republicans in particular have held the political initiative for an entire generation, i.e. since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. The only Democrat to be elected President between 1980 and 2008 was Bill Clinton, a white southerner, who lead by thoroughly “triangulated” administration, constantly negotiating with conservative politics. Republican appointments to the federal judiciary have lead to a conservative domination of that branch of government. The Republicans have run the congress for many years but even when they have not, they have been able to exercise a certain amount of control through their alliances with “blue dog” Democrats.
I believe that many Republican find it completely inconceivable that this balance of forces has shifted away from them in the US (think of the Communist Parties of the old eastern block in the 1980’s). They know beyond the petty abilities of polls and elections to say otherwise that the American people are fundamentally conservative and Republican. They only way for the Democrats to have won would have been fraud.
2) Barack Obama is Black. In the Dred Scott decision, the SCOTUS captured what had never been actually expressed in words before in any legal document in US history. Slave and the descendants of slaves are not citizens of the United States. This of course was not really surprising and hardly precedent setting. Dred Scott’s attorneys had been prepared for that line of reasoning. They had argued that the US constitution protects the rights of non-citizens as well as citizens and that even if Mr. Scott were not a citizen, he was still entitled to the protections listed in the constitution for non-citizens. SCOTUS ruled otherwise. The Dred Scott decision explicitly states that Black people are not only not citizens, they were not even non-citizens. They were ineligible for even the most elementary protections of constitution. They were in a word anti-citizens.
While the Dred Scott decision was legally overturned by the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments and a variety of other legislative acts and judicial rulings, psychologically many people still believe that the fundamental logic of the Dred Scott decision is still true, Black people are not citizens of the United States, either fully or even partially (e.g. 3/5ths of a citizen).
This is the profound “truth” of the “birther” movement, the petty details of the physical location of Mr. Obama’s birth or the existence of any meager legal documents cannot overcome the psychological Dred Scott decision, a Black man cannot possibly be legally qualified to be POTUS. It is simply impossible so all of those documents and facts must be fraudulent.
So we have not one but two absolutely impossible events occurring simultaneously, a Black Democrat has won the office of the President of the United States. Either event alone would be inconceivable to many Republicans but both at the same time. So of course there has to be a conspiracy, nothing else makes sense.
There is myth and fact…the Diebold voting machines were proved to be tampered with in Florida…
From internal Diebold memos:
Two memory cards were uploaded from Volusia Couny’s precinct 216, the second one was loaded sometime close to 2am in the morning. It automatically replaced the first card’s results and reduced Gore’s total by 16,022 votes and added several thousand votes to Bush plus a variety of minor candidates;
- Both memory cards loaded into the system clean and without errors, indicating (contrary to the official line) that they were not faulty;
- After the error was noticed the original card was reloaded and the mistake was rectified;
- The error was introduced in such a way that the total number of votes remained unchanged (again something that could not happen by chance.);
- According to the technical boffins, the chance of the memory card being corrupted and still passing the checksum error test are less than 60,000 to 1;
- The technical managers at Diebold Election Systems considered it a reasonable possibility that the second card was part of deliberate conspiracy to rig the election results.
E-Mail from the January audit:
—-Original Message—–
From: Lana Hires
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2001 8:07 AM
To: jmglobal Glanca
Cc: Deanie Lowe
Subject: 2000 November Election
Hi Nel, Sophie & Guy (you to John),
I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County.
I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here “looking dumb”.
I would appreciate an explanation on why the memory cards start giving check sum messages. We had this happen in several precincts and one of these precincts managed to get her memory card out of election mode and then back in it, continued to read ballots, not realizing that the 300+ ballots she had read earlier were no longer stored in her memory card . Needless to say when we did our hand count this was discovered.
Any explantations you all can give me will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks bunches,
Lana
**********
There is far more but the Bush election conspiracy theory has some real, verifiable problems that raises suspicion when you consider that Diebold machines could easily be corrupted and had been corrupted. That is far different from suspecting a group that is dedicated to a get out the vote campaign in distressed neighborhoods.
“Barack Obama is illegitimate,” is the Republicans’ version of “George W. Bush is going to suspend elections in 2008 and seize power as a dictator.”
Did a poll ever show that 52% of Democratic voters believed Bush was going to cancel elections? I’m not aware of one. I think it’s a false comparison. The Republican Party as a rule has calculatedly welcomed the paranoid fringe of conservatism under the party’s tent, and thus mainstreamed its rhetoric; the Democrats have kept that fringe as far away as possible from the party’s core. That’s why more McCain voters are more likely to believe the birther stuff than Obama voters believe in the 9/11 conspiracy theories. For instance, you can find multiple Members of Congress (Jean Schmidt, Trent Franks) who slyly legitimize the birther theory. I’m not aware of any Democratic members who are friendly to the ‘Bush brought down the WTC’ figment.
Mr. Roston,
I for one never even heard or read anyone actually say that Mr. Bush was planning a coup. I heard people say that other people were saying this but I never actually saw the original sources. There certainly were purple cheeked protesters marching around with loaded weapons proclaiming their preparation to prevent some sort of “Bush Putsch”.
In response to another comment. See in context »I think your point about “false consensus bias” seems right to me and is exacerbated by the fact that we live in a politically-segregated country. It’s red states and blue states. Republicans and Democrats live separately and go around talking to each other, reinforcing their partisan and sometimes totally incorrect ideas and assumptions.
Great post. So interesting! I would say I can’t believe it, but, knowing a lot of highly liberal and highly conservative circles, I really can.
Miss Cottrel,
I too find this interesting. Do you think this is a case of getting information from bias news sources? In the case of cable, right on Fox, left on MSNBC? It would be illuminating to give each dedicated viewer a questionnaire on current events.
In response to another comment. See in context »I think biased news sources can start a message that just keeps getting repeated in one circle until it’s twisted like an elementary school game of telephone.
Example: my husband’s family is very conservative. Evangelical Christians, homeschool, anti-evolution, etc. Last year, my niece, who’s 14 wrote a post on facebook about how she wasn’t going to let Barack Obama take her away to a concentration work camp for the summer and indoctrinate her with liberal ideas. She refused to go!
I couldn’t figure it out, until I saw that Michelle Bachmann had said something about how Obama’s stimulus money for kids to get summer jobs would include indoctrinating them with some sort of liberal values (as far as I know, not true). My niece heard this and felt she was going to be dragged away to one of these places. No one in her circle of people seemed to be able to correct her.
Where did she hear it? A tea party.
In response to another comment. See in context »Ms. Cottrell,
You must do a blog about this…its a bit ironic worried about indoctrination while being subjected to it…I find this very disturbing.
In response to another comment. See in context »We just had another election, were the polls open for amonth every day before the first Tuesday of November? No. Think it will happen again, never happened before.
[...] On: ACORN FAIL: 52% of GOP Conspiracists [...]
ACORN has taken over for THRUSH or SPECTRE as the bogey man for Republicans.The “steal-the-election” meme is about the evil ACORN more than it is about Obama. And by “steal”, I don’t think the Republicans mean act illegally, I think they mean act against the Republicans’ better interests. While they may think that ACORN illegally enlists voters, they don’t really think that millions of illegal voters changed the elections. They think that millions of legal voters shouldn’t have voted because they are too poor or too minority.
Really, those 52% of republicans aren’t crazy or even stupid, they’re just using the term “steal” in a different context.
Excuse me, have you NEVER heard of “Bush Derangement Syndrome”? Most of the left and many Democrats on the Hill espoused this for 8 years. They said they accepted the Supreme Court decision but still referred to him as illegitimate. For most it was more because he did not win a popular majority—even though our Constitution mandates the Electoral College.
And don’t forget, Bush won re-election by 3% and millions of votes. Yet many, including some in the Kerry campaign, continued to talk about Diebold and Ohio. Very interesting in that if Ohio had gone Kerry’s way, he would have had an Electoral College victory yet would have lost the popular vote to George W Bush by more than 6 times as many that Bush lost to Gore in 2000.
But of course then the same people who called Bush illegitimate in 2000 would never have questioned Kerry’s legitimacy!
[...] because 52% of Republican voters are now conspiracy theorists who a year after November 2008 think that President Obama stole the [...]