Your Assessment of the Election Is Way Off - How Social Media Warps Your Views

[ABX]

Call it “the big sort” or “demographic clusters” or whatever you like, it all comes down to the same thing: Even as Americans talk more and more about diversity, they are increasingly dividing themselves into like-minded bubbles where other people, with other experiences and viewpoints, almost never penetrate. This is the message of books by Charles Murray and Robert Frank, and indeed of our own social media feeds.....


.....Social media, of course, makes this problem worse. Even if we are not deliberately blocking people who disagree with us, Facebook curates our feeds so that we get more of the stuff we “like.” What do we “like”? People and posts that agree with us. Given that Facebook seems to be the top news source for millennials, and an increasingly important one even for folks who grew up skimming dead trees for information, that matters quite a lot.

It’s only natural, then, to wonder if the increasingly impenetrable bubbles are affecting our politics -- particularly the current campaigns, in which two angry outsiders are mounting serious challenges to the major parties......

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-04-14/social-media-distort-perceptions-of-the-presidential-election

[Weird Tolkienish Figure]

Specifically, I’m wondering about an odd phenomenon that I’ve noticed: the number of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders supporters, and to a lesser extent, the supporters of Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton, who seem to genuinely believe that there is a silent majority of folks out there who agree with them. Over and over I have asked these folks what they think will happen in the general election, given their candidate’s significant handicaps: Trump’s vulgarity and sky-high unfavorables, Sanders’s huge-government agenda, Clinton’s scandals and well-at-least-they’re-better-than-Trump favorability ratings, Cruz’s unappealing style and reputation as the hardest of ideological hardliners.

Sums it up. Dunno about lefties, but within the right wing there's a serious case of delusional thinking that we are the "silent majority" and someone like Trump (or even Cruz) is palatable to the rest of the country who aren't partisan fruitcakes. Right wingers are largely a bunch of over the hill angry talk radio listeners who think the rest of the country agrees with them. When Rush Limbaugh says the polls are skewed and Romney will win in a landslide the dupes eagerly lap it up like little puppies, uncritically.

[Frank Cannon]

Right wingers are largely a bunch of over the hill angry talk radio listeners who think the rest of the country agrees with them. When Rush Limbaugh says the polls are skewed and Romney will win in a landslide the dupes eagerly lap it up like little puppies, uncritically.

That's some provincial thinking. Fact is that on all levels except for the WH (State and local as well), Conservatives/Tea Party types have been sweeping elections everywhere. Over the last 8 years generations of Rats have been sent to the garbage pile to the point they don't have a bench of credible candidates to run for office. See: Sanders and Hitlary. This is not because some fat old guy on the radio is telling us to do so. It is because the solutions the candidates are selling are better.

[Weird Tolkienish Figure]

That's some provincial thinking. Fact is that on all levels except for the WH (State and local as well), Conservatives/Tea Party types have been sweeping elections everywhere. Over the last 8 years generations of Rats have been sent to the garbage pile to the point they don't have a bench of credible candidates to run for office. See: Sanders and Hitlary. This is not because some fat old guy on the radio is telling us to do so. It is because the solutions the candidates are selling are better.

Eh, easier to win elections in off years. We need to win Presidential races to gain control of courts. Since 1992, the GOP has won the popular vote once. That's over 20 years.