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 Originally Posted by Poopadoop
Is any of that actually meant to be taken seriously though? I mean are people basing anything they do on these numbers?
Oh absolutely. Politicians live and die by the polls.
One example: Clinton spent quite a long time out of the spotlight. Since the conventions, Trump was campaigning constantly while Clinton barely campaigned. This went on for weeks. Only within the last week has Clinton come out of the woodworks and start campaigning. There is one explanation that fits this behavior and it's also the explanation that political consultants state is common practice. The conventional wisdom is for a frontrunner to "do no harm", meaning to not spend much time in the spotlight since that makes it more likely for mistakes like gaffs to be made. Clinton earlier believed she was the frontrunner. She believed this from the polls. She is no longer in hiding because the polls reflect that she is no longer the frontrunner.
On a side note, this helps to get back to my point of the social sciences have a deficiency of qualitative experts. The "do no harm" strategy of a frontrunner is terrible. Any person who advises it should be fired, but it is by far the most common advice given to the situation. A much better assessment is that the risk of a gaff is too low to make the big mistake of not campaigning as the frontrunner and inevitably letting the opponent close in on you. It should be noted here that a true qualitative expert on these things, Trump, has a political strategy that prefers to campaign as the frontrunner. He and his camp believes that once he hits the clear poll lead, he will not lose it, because running as a leader is so much more fruitful than running from behind. He did this in the primaries. This is why he does things like talk up big time polls that put him in the lead and completely ignores ones that don't. After he becomes the optical frontrunner, he'll campaign hard as the inevitable winning winner that he is, and millions will be persuaded to back that winning winner because everybody likes backing winning winners because it makes them feel like winning winners too.
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