Here are excerpts from two excellent articles that posted last week. First up, Michael Cummings has some good advice for candidates (and all conservatives):
Poll after poll show those who identify as conservative outnumber those who identify as liberal by 2:1. My fellow Americans, we outnumber them 2 to 1. If we simply show up, the Left would not win another election.
In 2012, Mitt Romney lost by a mere 330,000 votes. From the same Breitbart article:
“Overall, voter turnout was down, from 131 million in 2008 to 122 million in 2012. Obama won 7.6 million fewer votes than he did in 2008, and Romney won 1.3 million fewer than McCain in 2008.”
Mitt Romney failed for a number of reasons, but he failed mostly because he didn’t fire up freedom-loving Americans to make the simple effort to vote. This is how much of a failure the Romney/Ryan campaign was. With everything Obama had done to our beloved country up until 2012, they couldn’t get a mere .001 of the US population to show up and just say, “Not Obama.”
…
Find the people who stayed home in 2012, and persuade them to join the fight. Show them why you’re different. Pledge your lives, fortunes, and sacred honor that you will not, under any circumstances, dishonor the promise the Republicans gave us in 2012 to stop Obama and undo the damage he and the Democrats have done.
This doesn’t mean you totally ignore people outside your base – you should speak to all Americans — but spend the bulk of your resources speaking directly to those who will uncross their arms, get out of their chairs, and make the effort to vote FOR YOU.
It seems elementary, but we all know many at the highest levels of politics often behave in a way that makes it a mystery as to how they ever got to the highest levels.
Read the entire article at Clash Daily.
Next up is Richard Winchester’s article “Americans ‘Moving Left’ on Social Issues. Really?” In it, he does an excellent analysis of the reliability of polling data — that part can’t be effectively excerpted — you need to read it in full. The part I want to highlight concerns the reality of the information war that I constantly write about. Here’s the first clip:
It doesn’t take much speculation to uncover the reason(s) for allegedly increasing “progressive” perspectives on social questions among the American public. For decades, those perspectives have been fed to Americans by the MSM, Hollywood, and Academe. Since Democrat elites have shifted leftward in recent years, people who ape their orientation will also drift toward “progressive” opinions on a host of issues. An exegesis of the left-leaning orientations of the MSM, Hollywood, Academe, and key left-wing Democrat pols would serve no useful purpose, because the American Thinker’s readers are all too familiar with the story.
Why does the seemingly endless litany of left-wing views on social issues in the MSM, Hollywood, Academe, and hard-left Democrat elites resonate at the grassroots? In The Responsible Electorate, published posthumously in 1966, political scientist V.O. Key, Jr. informed readers that the public is an echo chamber. As he noted, “[t]he output of an echo chamber bears an inevitable and invariable relation to the input.” If people are fed pap in the news and entertainment media, in school, and by key politicians, they will regurgitate pap to pollsters.
So for almost fifty years Republicans and conservatives have been ignoring what is not only common sense, but it’s backed up by scientific research: to win public opinion you have to fight for it.
One more excerpt:
Most people hold very few real opinions about political issues, in the sense that their “opinions” seldom shape their behaviors. For many people, for example, party identification may be the only real political disposition they have. Particularly when it comes to ideology, other than a well-educated, politically attentive, and knowledgeable minority, most Americans come up empty. As researchers put it, they “are innocent” of ideology.
For most people, most of the time, public affairs are, at best, a minor concern. Most people, most of the time, are far more focused on personal matters — such as work, family, health, and entertainment — that affect them directly.
Lack of attention to public affairs usually means an individual knows little about politics, and that goes a very long way towards explaining why “opinions” expressed to pollsters generally lack muscle tone.
All is not lost — unless conservatives continue to act as political pacifists when it comes to the information war.
You can read Winchester’s important article here.
Image credit: nationalreview.com.
