The echo chamber

A Jay Cost update...

I try to keep this blog regularly updated with what the best election blogger in the blogosphere, Jay Cost, is saying. This week, his HorseRaceBlog at RealClearPolitics has a response to Adam Nagourney's article on Hillary's vincibility. I linked to this article in my pre-debate reflections. Both Cost and I agree with it, and Cost adds a quibble with Nagourney's failure to clarify the meaning of summer polling results. In Cost's view summer polls are only a reflection of elite dialogue. That dialogue is reflected in polling results. I've discussed Cost's idea of the "echo chamber" before. It's completely accurate, in my view--ordinary people have difficulty figuring out which candidate is which. Their opinions are set for them by opinion leaders. Or to put it a better way, they don't yet have opinions because they don't have enough information to have opinions, and so they are basically playing a game of "guess the answer" to a trivia question when polled. That is to say, when asked a question by a pollster, they are trying not to look stupid. Cost gives an example of a not-unintelligent layman mixing up Giuliani and Romney's narratives to illustrate the point.

This is not our typical view of polls. If it were, we would pay a lot less attention to them. But then the media wouldn't be able to generate as much news and excitement from the expensive polls they commission. So the media is not going to blow the cover on the whole scam, and tell us straight up how meaningless it is. It's satisfying to have bloggers like Cost in tune with what is really happening in the race.