How to Read the Polls

Weekly Standard ^ | 08/24/2012 | Jay Cost

[SeekAndFind]

In every presidential cycle, there is a debate about partisan identification in polling. Conservatives complain about too few Republicans being sampled; pollsters, journalists, and liberals respond by saying it is inappropriate to weigh polls by party identification.

What to make of all this?

The primary issue relates to the population that polls are sampling. There are several populations to choose from, and we can conceive of this as a series of concentric circles.

The idea here is that each circle represents a different population that can be sampled – but with a twist. The adult population includes all other sub-populations, the registered voter population is smaller than the adult population but includes likely and actual voters, and so on. And of course we cannot poll the actual voters until after they have voted!

Each population is worth polling, albeit for different questions. For instance, if you want a gauge of “consumer confidence,” you naturally sample the adult population. If you want a measure of how voters think about the state of the economy, a poll of adults would not be your best bet.

The reason that polls become a partisan football is that the further out on the circles you move, the more Democratic the poll usually gets. Likely voter polls usually have fewer Democrats than registered voter polls, which have fewer Democrats than adult polls.

[SeekAndFind]

We also have to keep history in mind. Over the last quarter century, party identification on Election Day has actually been quite stable in presidential elections.



Also, Compare Obama’s average lead or deficit to the average Democratic identification edge (among the voters), and you can get a solid gauge of the state of the race. For instance, consider these polls currently included in the RealClearPolitics average. All of them provide the head-to-head numbers between Obama and Romney as well as the partisan identification of those included in the poll.



Right now, the average across the polls is about a one-point lead for Obama; there's also a Democratic registration advantage that fits in with the long-term trend. That suggests right now, this is a pretty solid take on the state of the race.

[doc1019]

How to Read the Polls

Don't

[Cyber Liberty]

I’m analphabetic. Huh? What?

[AndyTheBear]

In 2004 Republican were fired up by the aftermath of the 2000 election and then by 9/11/2001....we get D and R even here.

In 2008 the Republicans were fatigued of Bushiness of Bush, and Democrats were fired up about their new Messiah. We get D+7 here.

In 2012 Democrats are fatigued by their false Messaih and horrid economy, and Republicans are fit to be tied spitting mad and will crawl through glass to vote.

I think +3 dem is nonsense...I would guess some small amount + for the Rs for the first time.

[FredZarguna]

First: Taking polls with different sampling criteria and averaging them is not a valid statistical technique. Sorry, but it just is not, because polls with different sampling techniques or cohorts are not measuring the same thing. Averaging them makes no more sense than averaging apples and bananas to get the average number of apples in your kitchen. This is why the RCP average is nonsense.

Second, the diagram is mostly, but not entirely correct. Likely voters ought to be -- but isn't quite -- a proper subset of registered voters. Discounting fraud, which is small but exists, would make likely voters and actual voters both proper subsets of registered voters. But it is still not the case that actual voters is a proper subset of likely voters. The CRUX of accuracy in presidential election polling now is entirely a matter of how to correctly determine if a likely voter will actually vote, AND if there are registered voters who will vote who are not captured by the "likely" formula.

[AndyTheBear]

astute observations Fred

[Mike Darancette]

I think +3 dem is nonsense..

It is at least what it was in 2010.

[nathanbedford]

The CRUX of accuracy in presidential election polling now is entirely a matter of how to correctly determine if a likely voter will actually vote, AND if there are registered voters who will vote who are not captured by the "likely" formula.

So, Fred, if I understand you correctly the key to accurate polling is to measure intensity and to accurately size the "likely" voting group. I do not know that any poll tells me much about intensity-is this so?

I have a gut feeling without any empirical evidence to support my view that 2012 will look very much more like 2010 than previous presidential election cycles and that is because of an inchoate understanding that intensity is on the side of Republicans and normally uninvolved citizens not regarded to be likely voters will in fact turnout and support the Republicans.

Do I understand you to say that my suspicion, if proved correct in the event, will play a far more decisive role than normally accepted?

I also note that the chart showing the relative Democrat/Republican breakdown shows no consistent correlation in the size of the victory for other party. Can the intensity factor explain this?

[Intolerant in NJ]

journalists, and liberals respond by saying it is inappropriate to weigh polls by party identification...of course they do, but the fact remains that to get a good statistical measurement of "reality", you have to have a representative sample of the underlying population which you're trying to picture - and that means including appropriate ratios of the political parties in the sample......

[FredZarguna]

The ideal obviously is to poll actual voters, but since we can't do that the key is to make sure your statistical model for actual voters -- which is called "likely" voters -- is a good one.

Intensity is not the only measure but it is probably the single largest factor that campaigns can actually alter in a base-dominated election, which it looks like this will be. For example: age is a huge indicator of likeliness, but unfortunately none of us can change that. So is party affiliation; Republicans turn out in consistently larger percentages. One of the reasons that the 2006 and 2008 cycles were so deadly to us was that turnout among the base was down, in consequence of which the Dems' raw numerical superiority was more damaging to us than usual.

The polls of "likely voters" do tell you about intensity, but you don't realize it, because it is very carefully hidden in the internals, and everyone attempts to mask how they arrive at intensity. It's a closely guarded trade secret. It's actually quite interesting, because pollsters reputations are based on how closely their polls track to results and they have to show some of their cards in order to be useful to the people they sell information to. We know Gallup has been consistently good once they switch to the "likely" model, and we know that in the last three presidential cycles Rasmussen has been even better.

We also know some of the questions they ask in order to determine likelihood: did you vote in 2010? [People who vote in an off-year election are motivated voters.] How often do you vote? [Habitués are always likelies.] Did you contribute money? [Contributors are guaranteed voters.] Will you vote by absentee ballot? [Absentee participation by citizens within country is a very strong likely indicator.]

But they also ask highly proprietary questions about specific issues important to voters, and they have statistics on how strongly intensity tracks to those issues. Pollsters also gauge intensity on the basis of exit polls from previous elections, and then use those to forecast if those issues voters will be motivated to show up in current cycle. They do trend-line analysis and determine intensity on the basis of whether an issue is falling or rising on the priorities rankings. All of this goes in to the "special sauce" that forms the algorithms for determining likely voters.

I also believe that you're right about this election. I think one of the reasons that 0bama is so worried about money is that the numbers from contributions are a broad-based indicator of intensity, and that does not bode well for him. He will certainly get far more free "money" from the collaborationist press and labor unions than Romney will. That is always true. But that is not an indicator of intensity from the rank and file voter.

There is no correlation in the relative Democrat/Republican breakdown for a number of reasons. For one thing, party affiliation is a lagging indicator, and for that reason pollsters stopped asking for party affiliation about 10 years ago, and now rely almost exclusively on party self-identification (my Dad is still a registered Democrat, but the last Dem he voted for in a presidential election was Harry Truman.) The problem with party identification is that it's also a lagging indicator and there are a lot of people in the squishy middle who identified as Republican in the last election who voted for 0bama. To me that says they a) don't know what their party is about and/or b) had no clue what the modern Democrat Party is. In any event, party identification is more meaningful than party affiliation (or party registration in places -- like Pennsylvania where I live -- where it's required) as an indicator of long-term trends. Fewer and fewer people identify with either party. This makes the degree of Dem oversampling particularly misleading. But when the number of people who identify as Republicans rises to be nearly equal to the number of people who identify as Dems, the country is clearly swinging right. Then the likely models have to be adjusted for issues of more importance to right wing voters ...

The numbers indicating +-/error% in polls employ nothing more than a well known statistical inference about the standard deviation of a sample mean based on sample size -- the error is proportional to the inverse square root of the sample. That, in turn, already assumes that you are taking a purely random sample from the actual population you're trying to measure. There are two problems with that: 1) The sample is never random. There are systematic reasons and one of the most troublesome is that the refusal rate is much higher among Republicans than among independents and democrats, which makes a correction from true randomness necessary (And it is not generally agreed what that number is, or why.) 2) The VERY PROBLEM IN POLLING is making sure you are polling someone in the population. And, as this article correctly explains neither adults, nor registered voters is a good representation of the actual voting population.

[nathanbedford]

Thank you for the mini tutorial. Let me impose on your good nature and ask you to amplify a bit more.

Why do pollsters tell us the breakdown of party affiliation/identification when it must mean very little to them and to their colleagues in the polling industry?

In 2010 when I saw the enrollment of Republicans increasing relative to Democrats, I instinctively believed that it would make a landslide election in favor of the Republicans, and this eventuated-but the post hoc event does she not necessarily prove causation. Yet I believe I was not far off in this prediction even as you say party affiliation shows long-term trend but not necessarily immediate voting predilections. Yet the act of changing affiliation, or proclaiming affiliation, seems to be an affirmative act that is indicative of intensity.

You say that increases in Republican affiliation numbers which tend to approach Democrat levels indicates a trend for Republicans. At this point the pollsters must adjust their issues in order to determine the class of likely voters. It seems to me this is a chicken and egg situation or, more to the point, a situation in which perception itself shapes the object. For example, when Obama made his live microphone observation to the effect that voters in Pennsylvania who were not in his camp were clinging to their Bibles and guns, was he speaking as someone who has been educated by posters about issues which are toxic to Democrats? In other words, Obama had been well educated to the phenomenon.

I cannot conceive of an issue more invigorating to Republican intensity than an assault on weapons by Democrats. This would explain Obama's initial reluctance to speak out in the wake of mass shootings for gun control and it would further explain the Republican vigor in investigating Fast and Furious. In other words, politicians who are made aware aware of the power of certain issues stir them up to expand the perimeter of their likely voter base. Thus, the target is ever moving and very difficult for a pollster to work backwards from. That is, if the pollster is trying to identify likely voters from the issues and the issues are being exploited to control likely voters, we have the classic perception-affecting-reality conundrum.

To pick up on another of your remarks:

The problem with party identification is that it's also a lagging indicator and there are a lot of people in the squishy middle who identified as Republican in the last election who voted for 0bama. To me that says they a) don't know what their party is about and/or b) had no clue what the modern Democrat Party is.

It is long been my intuition that the people of Democrat party are accurately described by your sub heading b), "had no clue what the modern Democrat party is." That is one of the main reasons for Nathan Bedford's first Maxim of American politics: "all politics in America is not local but ultimately racial." That means that the Democrats use race not only as a sword but as a buckler to prevent exposure of the true nature, the truly radical leftist pathology, which is the reality of the modern Democrat party. It is ruthless because its ideology is ruthless and because it has been suborned by George Soros who has converted the party into a kind of Soviet with ruthless discipline. Race is invoked by the Democrats whenever necessary to cover their multitude of sins, to mask their toxic radicalism.

Race is also used as a sword as it was in 2008 in which the electorate was inveigled into voting for Obama because that would generate a post-racial America of harmony and sunshine. Most of the revelations which are now being more broadly reported concerning Obama's biography and radical associations were actually known before the 2008 election and were broadly ventilated here on Free Republic but they were not reported by the media and certainly gained no general traction. I ascribed this to the media's myopia generated by race sensitivity. I posted at the time the only way, John McCain could win that race was Sarah Palin's way, a full unmitigated exposure of Obama's radicalism so that he were morally destroyed. This McCain emphatically and explicitly refused to do thus preserving his own high-minded conception of himself but at the cost of the political party who had entrusted him with the nomination and their contributions.

Whether the issue is guns or race, we see politicians on both sides changing the dynamics, making it very difficult for posters to anchor their assumptions on dry land.

So, when Rush Limbaugh says that polls are used as a weapon there is a secondary sense beyond his meaning which is the public is fed false numbers (manipulated by party affiliation) to condition their intensity. It seems to me that the polls are advising politicians how to shape intensity with issues. This is not earthshaking until one considers how utterly committed to this policy the Obama campaign has been in this election cycle. We have parallel realities competing for the electoral majority. On the one hand Romney talking about the economy and more traditional issues and Obama desperately seeking to energize his base and to divert Romney's.

In this context, one must revert one more time to the media which will aid and abet Obama and his campaign and trivialize and detour Romney as much as possible. A superficial observer might conclude that the media and various politicians are reacting to issues as they pop up but the reality is actually sinister because it is the reverse. We see this all being played out today in raw relief in the Todd Akin controversy where Republicans are openly basing their policy concerning Akin on its presumed impact on Romney's polls.

My view of the state of the election contest is the metaphor of the pressure cooker which has no safety valve. We know the secular forces are favoring the Republicans yet the polls, even adjusted for party affiliation exaggerations etc., do not show the expected up swell of public indignation which should redound to the benefit of the Republicans. What is holding the lid on?

I suppose there is a friction which creates a lag. Party affiliation, voting habituation, malaise, ignorance, and disinterest. There are the factors which we frequently talk about here in this forum such as ethnic realities involving, for example, African-American and Jewish voters. There is the demographic impact of immigration in which the Democrats (and to a shameful extent, George Bush) have swelled the voting rolls with people who are simply not inclined to value democracy and capitalism. There is the dependency factor in which we are confronted with the shocking reality that half of America is now on the dole of one sort or another.

The steam within the pressure cooker, though, must be building from the dreary employment numbers, the housing debacle in which at least a third of Americans have lost their savings as their houses go underwater, the soaring small business failure rate, the rupture of the higher education dream, the cost of our life blood at the gasoline pump, indignation over Obamacare, and etc. There are other factors which are perhaps even more important but which do not play directly on individuals' lives such as the soaring deficits, the looming debt crisis, the perfect storm of expected secondary recessions in China, Europe, and now in America, the nightmare of the Arab spring, and etc. These factors are probably the ones the pollsters are telling Romney to deemphasize and stay with jobs, small business concerns, and taxes. But this is yet another example of polls shaping reality rather than reflecting it.

I have ventured far away from questions concerning the nuts and bolts of polling on to more philosophical exploration of the dynamic. What should we as conservatives be on the alert for when it comes to this kind of manipulation?

Thanks for your tutorial.

[DaveA37]

Polls don’t mean diddly..It’s who counts the votes that makes the difference. People get all wrapped up in the “predictions” are just hoping that the election goes the way THEY see it forthcoming........AGAIN, It’s who counts the votes........

Why are the American people not screaming their heads off about the votes being sent to Spain (Geo. Soros’s company) to be counted??????????? Will we EVER LEARN?

[TomEwall]

Jay Cost is usually quite good, but I also thought D+3 was a bit odd. Even is what I would guess.

If Obama stays at 48% Job Approval, I think it will be very close. It could be like 2004 where getting out the base makes the difference.

[FredZarguna]

Why do pollsters tell us the breakdown of party affiliation/identification when it must mean very little to them and to their colleagues in the polling industry?

Party self-identification means more. Good polls provide information on a number of cohorts, not just party ID; and they provide that information because information consumers insist on it. The public isn't the only audience. In fact, it isn't usually the most important one in a poll that is an actual poll (as opposed to a push-poll -- which most of the "horse race" polls are.)

In 2010 when I saw the enrollment of Republicans increasing relative to Democrats, I instinctively believed that it would make a landslide election in favor of the Republicans, and this eventuated-but the post hoc event does she not necessarily prove causation. Yet I believe I was not far off in this prediction even as you say party affiliation shows long-term trend but not necessarily immediate voting predilections. Yet the act of changing affiliation, or proclaiming affiliation, seems to be an affirmative act that is indicative of intensity.

It is. But self-identification is a less clear indicator of who is a likely voter. Registered voters and adults (unfiltered by any mechanism except party ID) tend to identify with the incumbent's party if they're satisfied, and against his party if they're not. This is more useful in Presidential years, because the research shows that unless there is a VERY LARGE issue that's put Congress in the news, voters do not identify for or against the Congressional Party in power, or even for or against their own incumbent congressman/senator.

You say that increases in Republican affiliation numbers which tend to approach Democrat levels indicates a trend for Republicans. At this point the pollsters must adjust their issues in order to determine the class of likely voters. It seems to me this is a chicken and egg situation or, more to the point, a situation in which perception itself shapes the object. For example, when Obama made his live microphone observation to the effect that voters in Pennsylvania who were not in his camp were clinging to their Bibles and guns, was he speaking as someone who has been educated by posters about issues which are toxic to Democrats? In other words, Obama had been well educated to the phenomenon.

Politicians don't have to be trained to avoid or embrace issues. That part is easy. Politicians have to be trained to resist their instincts; like actors, they are people with large egos whose self-worth depends to a very large degree on the approval of strangers. The image -- the role they play -- is everything to their success. But they're public people and that means they want to ingratiate themselves, to be liked, even loved by their constituency. When they're in a room with supporters, their tendency is to revert to confidences, because they feel comfortable and at home. The need to project their public persona is not as great, so the danger that they'll betray some aspect of their true personality is high.

I cannot conceive of an issue more invigorating to Republican intensity than an assault on weapons by Democrats. This would explain Obama's initial reluctance to speak out in the wake of mass shootings for gun control and it would further explain the Republican vigor in investigating Fast and Furious. In other words, politicians who are made aware aware of the power of certain issues stir them up to expand the perimeter of their likely voter base. Thus, the target is ever moving and very difficult for a pollster to work backwards from. That is, if the pollster is trying to identify likely voters from the issues and the issues are being exploited to control likely voters, we have the classic perception-affecting-reality conundrum.

True, but there is also a calculation. Before the mid-1990's, Democrats believed gun control was a classic "wedge issue" which would energize their base just as much as it energized Republicans. But a lot of polling research conducted retroactively to Reagan's election through the 1994 election pointed to a conclusion that gun control was NOT a wedge issue: it energized conservatives, but except for a very small percentage of Democrats with very high intensity on the issue it gained nothing for them. This was a tough lesson to accept, because the Democrat leadership is in that group. But actually more than half their party is not.

It is long been my intuition that the people of Democrat party are accurately described by your sub heading b), "had no clue what the modern Democrat party is."

On that we agree, and on the basis of many encounters with people in my own family that they not only do not know, they will not accept what their party represents even when you smack them right in the face with it. It has, for many, a deep cultural -- even religious -- aspect.

That is one of the main reasons for Nathan Bedford's first Maxim of American politics: "all politics in America is not local but ultimately racial." That means that the Democrats use race not only as a sword but as a buckler to prevent exposure of the true nature, the truly radical Leftist pathology, which is the reality of the modern Democrat party. It is ruthless because its ideology is ruthless and because it has been suborned by George Soros who has converted the party into a kind of Soviet with ruthless discipline. Race is invoked by the Democrats whenever necessary to cover their multitude of sins, to mask their toxic radicalism.

I believe this is too particular. American politics (all politics) is ultimately about identification and alienation. The details of that are often racial, and that is particularly true because the Democrat Party has become a Party almost entirely of group identity. Conservatives still identify as individuals, and identify with others of like mind, and they are alienated by group identification -- at least in political terms. As supposedly astute a politician as Bill Clinton is, he did not understand this, to his wife's undoing in 2008. He did not understand that race trumps gender in group identification, and that self-hating white liberals have a deep-seated need to patronize and identify with blacks. I don't believe this is because of blackness per se. I believe it because victimhood is a broad self-identification of the Left, and blacks are still their iconic victim group.

Race is also used as a sword as it was in 2008 in which the electorate was inveigled into voting for Obama because that would generate a post-racial America of harmony and sunshine.

Somewhat true, but remember a majority of white Americans did not vote for 0bama, so the post-racial-harmony-sunshine voters were mostly soft-headed Independents he picked up on the margins.

Most of the revelations which are now being more broadly reported concerning Obama's biography and radical associations were actually known before the 2008 election and were broadly ventilated here on Free Republic but they were not reported by the media and certainly gained no general traction. I ascribed this to the media's myopia generated by race sensitivity.

I don't doubt there's a component, and a large one. But I would also ascribe it to the media's own identification with his mindset, and their belief that Leftist radicalism is "really not all that bad." For example: it is now a universal (except for a very small core or historically informed people) that Joe McCarthy was an evil person, and that somehow a junior senator running a small (but well publicized) investigation was more dangerous to the life of the Republic than an avowed enemy that had been spying on us for years with nuclear weapons. The "red scare" is described as a "witch hunt." But the salient feature of that depiction is that there are no such things as witches; and the invariably sarcastic description of a "red scare" implies that there was, in fact, nothing to be scared of. More largely, the idea that there is no Leftist threat to America -- all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding -- is now fully ingrained.

I posted at the time the only way, John McCain could win that race was Sarah Palin's way, a full unmitigated exposure of Obama's radicalism so that he were morally destroyed. This McCain emphatically and explicitly refused to do thus preserving his own high-minded conception of himself but at the cost of the political party who had entrusted him with the nomination and their contributions.

This is ultimately the rift between conservatives and beltway Republicans. The old guard insists on allowing the Left to set the tone and even the language. What Romney said in the "secret" Romney tapes is completely true. It is not the least bit controversial. People who expect the government to pass out favors will not vote for a man who professes to believe in personal freedom and individual responsibility; and they indeed form the core Democrat constituency. The percentage was high. That is a quibble.

Yet Romney is described as "coughing blood" over this by the invertebrates who would give us no peace until they got him as our candidate in the first place. This has gone on too long. The confrontation is necessary and should be embraced. What Romney did was unacceptable because he told the truth, not because he was insensitive.

So, when Rush Limbaugh says that polls are used as a weapon there is a secondary sense beyond his meaning which is the public is fed false numbers (manipulated by party affiliation) to condition their intensity. It seems to me that the polls are advising politicians how to shape intensity with issues. This is not earthshaking until one considers how utterly committed to this policy the Obama campaign has been in this election cycle. We have parallel realities competing for the electoral majority. On the one hand Romney talking about the economy and more traditional issues and Obama desperately seeking to energize his base and to divert Romney's.

True, but this is also being done to us, by our own pollsters. One of the reasons that "our" politicians are so reluctant to confront the Left on fundamental issues is that our premiere information specialists -- Scott Rasmussen and Frank Luntz -- have been telling them for years that this is an ineffective technique. They're wrong, and we need to stop listening to them.

In this context, one must revert one more time to the media which will aid and abet Obama and his campaign and trivialize and detour Romney as much as possible. A superficial observer might conclude that the media and various politicians are reacting to issues as they pop up but the reality is actually sinister because it is the reverse. We see this all being played out today in raw relief in the Todd Akin controversy where Republicans are openly basing their policy concerning Akin on its presumed impact on Romney's polls.

I think the concern in that context is more about winning the Senate than the effect it has on Romney. But yes, in general terms I agree with you. The polls are being used to drive opinion rather than reflect it.

My view of the state of the election contest is the metaphor of the pressure cooker which has no safety valve. We know the secular forces are favoring the Republicans yet the polls, even adjusted for party affiliation exaggerations etc., do not show the expected up swell of public indignation which should redound to the benefit of the Republicans. What is holding the lid on?

I suppose there is a friction which creates a lag. Party affiliation, voting habituation, malaise, ignorance, and disinterest. There are the factors which we frequently talk about here in this forum such as ethnic realities involving, for example, African-American and Jewish voters. There is the demographic impact of immigration in which the Democrats (and to a shameful extent, George Bush) have swelled the voting rolls with people who are simply not inclined to value democracy and capitalism. There is the dependency factor in which we are confronted with the shocking reality that half of America is now on the dole of one sort or another.

And I believe the culture of dependence is the heart of the issue. Romney is being mocked for the 47%. But I think that freeloaders and their liberal enablers do indeed account for about the percentage of Americans. It would be sad if it were not so genuinely dangerous and alarming.

The steam within the pressure cooker, though, must be building from the dreary employment numbers, the housing debacle in which at least a third of Americans have lost their savings as their houses go underwater, the soaring small business failure rate, the rupture of the higher education dream, the cost of our life blood at the gasoline pump, indignation over Obamacare, and etc. There are other factors which are perhaps even more important but which do not play directly on individuals' lives such as the soaring deficits, the looming debt crisis, the perfect storm of expected secondary recessions in China, Europe, and now in America, the nightmare of the Arab spring, and etc. These factors are probably the ones the pollsters are telling Romney to deemphasize and stay with jobs, small business concerns, and taxes. But this is yet another example of polls shaping reality rather than reflecting it.

The soft bigotry of low expectations.

Inevitably, if you believe voters are stupid, only stupid voters will listen to your message. If you believe they can only focus on a few issues, only the ADD/ADHD voters will be paying attention; and you'd better be right about the handful of issues you pick.

Politicians are convinced that "staying on message" means emphasizing a few core issues. In my opinion this is baloney. The cost of food and gasoline -- the cost of everything -- is as legitimate an issue as the jobs issue, and it affects everyone, including people who have jobs. 0bama can claim that he can't control the price of gasoline (although he campaigned on the idea that he could in 2008) but even if we stipulate to that, the cost of gasoline isn't the only thing that's doubled since 2008. So has the cost of bread. So -- nearly -- has the price of milk.

The administration's incompetence and deception in the Libya debacle is another angle which reveals just how far this President is in over his head. Voters can connect that issue quite easily to the jobs issue: an administration which cannot provide adequate security with prior warning on 9/11 of all days of the year is not competent to do ANYTHING, and it has proven that over and over again.

What should we as conservatives be on the alert for when it comes to this kind of manipulation?

I don't believe this is the issue. I think conservatives are quite aware of it. Our problem is not with recognizing the manipulation. Our problem has always been with communicating with the other people in the governing coalition that we need to build. They do not recognize that they're being manipulated, but more fundamentally they don't get our message because our standard-bearers are ashamed of it.

[Hemingway's Ghost]

I believe it because victimhood is a broad self-identification of the Left

One of the most astute statements I've encountered on FR. Well done, sir.