Posted by
Opinionmill Author on Tuesday, October 31, 2006 12:30:26 PM
Originally Posted at
Opinionimill.com
As we have been in the past, we will all be shocked next week when the polls close. The evangelicals will impact and turn the election and here is why:
1) Pollsters do not have control of their datasets.
One thing that everybody agreed on in the 2000 and 2004 elections was that they were surprised. Liberals claim that the election process is rigged. Conservatives claim that the polls are rigged. I believe that the pollsters do not have control of their data and therefore the results are simply incorrect. One statistic that I would love to see is how often people respond to a pollster with the words “please remove me from your list and don’t bother my family during dinner”. How often do people simply screen their calls?
The reason that this matters is that I believe that the evangelical community is less likely to participate in polling and is therefore excluded from the statistical population.
1) They don’t trust the mainstream media, associate pollsters with that group, and simply don’t participate.
2) They value evening time with family and consider pollsters no different than telemarketers. The result, they hang up without giving a response or they screen their calls.
If you fail to include the evangelical population in your dataset, your results will be incorrect (as we have observed). Common wisdom tells us that the United States is a conservative country. Democrats try to distance themselves from the word liberal, they never run on liberal policy, and they are constantly inventing euphemisms to disguise their positions (choice, progressive, etc.) You wouldn’t know that our nation was conservative by looking at the polls.
2) The democrats have been campaigning non-stop for the republicans for two years.
The Democrats frequently insult the values of Evangelical Christians. In doing so, they continually campaign for the GOP.
Here is an example that just broke this morning. In the video clip below, John Kerry makes a statement that Soldiers are uneducated, unwilling, and unappreciated. To fully understand the impact, you should know that evangelical churches across the United States pray for the safety of American troops in Iraq and around the world on a daily basis. They are seen as our children, courageous, just, and standing between those who would massacre innocent life to drive a wicked agenda operating in polar opposition to the values that we hold dear.
To watch over and over how liberal media and Democratic Senators such as John Kerry attack our armed services is like a punch in the stomach. Evangelicals are required to turn the other cheek, but they will delight in punching a hole in the little R box on a ballot.
More about this at hotair.com
3) The long tail and its impact on voter education.
The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine) and describes certain business and economic models that, through the removal of technological barriers, open potentially unlimited distribution channels. Examples of leveraging the long tail in business are Amazon.com and Netflix (technology provides unlimited choices vs. tradition brick and mortar model).
This concept applies to new media (blogging, talk radio, google news, etc.) and the result is that evangelicals (and conservatives in general) consume this information to become more educated and aware of liberal bias in the media and culture. Smear and disinformation campaigns do not work as well as they did in old media, in fact the dishonesty fuels the opposition.
4) The discipline of the evangelical lifestyle.
Evangelical Christians strive to live a lifestyle that produces fruit (love, peace, patience, joy, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self control) in their lives. They also are called by Christ to be the salt (the preservative) of the earth and work towards applying these attributes to their communities. To think that the evangelical community would overlook the democratic process in this election (stem cell research, nuclear Iran proposing an Israeli Holocaust, and the opportunity to strike against judicial activism) is simply naive. Evangelicals will turn out in droves.