Sunday’s column: Raking it in — by fueling delusions
Dean Chambers, of UnskewedPolls.com
Note from Dan: When I embarked on this column, it was on a weak hunch that Dean Chambers might be a liberal pulling a devilishly clever stunt that would a) lure conservatives into an argument that would backfire badly on them; and b) make some money for himself at the same time. But as you’ll discover below, that wasn’t exactly the case.
Once upon a time nine weeks ago, there was a guy nobody had ever heard of in Duffield, a teeny Scott County town deep in the heart of Virginia coal country. As the crow flies, it’s about 40 miles or so west of Abingdon.
His name is Dean Chambers, he’s 45, unmarried, with no kids and he grew up on Cape Cod. Years ago, he earned a political science degree from a college in Maine, and later did some graduate work at the University of Tennessee.
His ardent hobby was writing about politics from a conservative perspective. Chambers published his work on The Examiner, a citizen-journalism website that pays authors about six-tenths of a penny each time someone reads one of their stories.
But his efforts languished there in relative obscurity, buried under a mountain of more provocative stuff. Last week, The Examiner had 492 article about contrails, 3,500 about bigfoot, 45,000 about the Tea Party, and 368,000 that mentioned Britney Spears.
So for years, Chambers had paid his bills working in tech support jobs for outfits such as AOL while he bounced around the western United States.
By March, he had dropped his last tech job and moved to Duffield because his brother and sister-in-law already lived there. And those small checks from The Examiner dribbled in.
Initially, those had amounted to little more than pocket change. But by the end of August a respectable amount was coming in — about $120 per day, paid monthly. That wasn’t steak and lobster, but it was a living. Still, after federal and state taxes, the self-employment tax, rent for his apartment and other expenses, there wasn’t a lot left over.
Then one day Chambers hit upon an idea: He’d “correct” all those polls that showed Mitt Romney, the presidential candidate he preferred, losing the race.
READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.
November 11, 2012 - 6:00 AM
Congratulations to Mr. Chambers for figuring out how to make some money on the internet. Exploiting the conservative puditocracy is a time honored and certain way to do it. Rush or Sean Hannity never much care if the information has merit as long as it meets their personal sensibility test. But why assume that all the polls, in all the places are oversampling democrats?
Did he ever give a reason, a calculation or some kind of data set that had the slightest empirical evidence? Nope, and with the help of the conservative infotainers who don’t look too skeptically at to good to be true news, he got his ten minutes of fame and some pocket change.
In the mean time, the cold hard analysts such as Nate Silver were busy averaging numbers and comparing them against historical track records and predicting things that were absolutely, dead on, true. They did in 2008 too.
I hope Mr Chambers continues to dabble in his brand of polling analysis. He will always find a ready market for “unskewed” political information and the beauty of it all is that he can keep being miserably wrong and still make a living at it. Rush, Sean and Dick Morris prove that every day.
People got to make a living I guess.
Just to add a little relevant data to the discussion.
http://pbump.tumblr.com/post/35035727547/when-you-hear-someone-lie-and-say-sandy-slowed
Yesterday’s article by Nate Silver is quite detailed and very interesting. He surveys the various polls and their methodologies and found those that used “robocalls” to land lines to be the least reliable and those that incorporated on line and cell phones to be more reliable. The trend is toward a younger populace moving away from landlines to cell phones and the internet and an older, more conservative population sticking to landlines. It is interesting to note that Gallup has done poorly in the last 3 elections whereas Google was almost dead on this election. Locally a Roanoke College poll did very poorly having Romney bias of 8.1 points.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-polls-fared-best-and-worst-in-the-2012-presidential-race/
Chambers is just one more example of the Karl Rove philosophy that if you repeat a lie often enough and loudly enough, many people will come to accept it as truth. And if you can skew enough of them in that direction, you might win an election. Only now it’s not working as well as it did for GWB. People are finally beginning to catch on.
Re: Comment by scott whitaker — November 11, 2012 @ 9:11 am
Thanks for the link.
For some reason I haven gotten the RSS feed for that article. Should have. I unsubscribe and resubscribe.
I have a great idea for Mr. Chambers that seems just right for him. He should start unskewedglobalwarming.com and change the climatologists’ model outputs to “correct” for the liberal modeling bias. The beauty of this one is that he could continue this stupidity for a long time – there is no impending election to end the money train.
I’m picturing the end as an editorial cartoon with Chambers sitting in a little life raft in the middle of the ocean (formerly known as Virginia Beach) saying “But I thought they were oversampling temperature from newly urbanized areas!”
Obviously he’s late for the climate-change-is-a-hoax party, as the people who are behind sites like globalwarminghoax.com and climate-skeptic.com thought of this money-making scheme a long time ago.
Maybe historical stupidity of unskewedpolls can be useful to help climate change doubters and deniers that the people promoting the “It’s a hoax!” position aren’t just full of it, but there getting paid $$$ to be full of it.
Interesting article Dan.
Chambers typifies “stupid is as stupid does”
From several articles I’ve read, Romney had a bunch of “yes men” around him telling him how great and smart he is. Typical behavior for many failed CEOs.
Chambers and a lot of other smart people underestimated the silent but vast cheating network. They were comparing things like attendance at rallies, focus groups after debates, and just the general sense that Romney pounded 0bama on every idea possible. But fraudulent and dead “voters” don’t show up to rallies or respond to pollsters. The notion 0bama voters were anything near as jazzed they were in 2008 is just not believable. 880 0bama voters to 13 Romney voters in one local district is also not believable.
“880 0bama voters to 13 Romney voters in one local district is also not believable.”
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then. How else to explain the 13 Romney voters?
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then. How else to explain the 13 Romney voters?
I think the “counters” figured 893 to 0 would draw some attention.
Re: Comment by Suzie — November 11, 2012 @ 1:02 pm
Die große Lüge [a.k.a. Rants & Raves - w /lies] is still at it.
The United States Office of Strategic Services in describing Hitler’s psychological profile as follows:
“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it” – Hitler as His Associates Know Him (OSS report, p.51)
Sound like someone we know?
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BTW, before you jump in it again, Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies does not hold that he who evokes Hitler first loses. In fact, there are corollaries, which hold that fallaciously miscasting an opponent’s comparison is an ulterior-motive invocation of Godwin’s law; is, in and of itself, a fallacy; and will be unsuccessful in a debate. So no need to go there.
Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies simply states: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1″ — i.e., it is only time until the likelihood of such a reference is fulfilled.
Godwin did not say that all such references were Reductio ad Hitlerum or argumentum ad Hitlerum fallacies, either.
In this case, I am not drawing any traditional Aristotelian syllogistic logical conclusions.
I am just pointing out a stark similarity.
There was a GOP observer there, Suzie. He had the opportunity to spot and report any so-called “cheating” that was occurring. He reported none. Which means you’re just blowing smoke.
#9 Please provide all the proof you have of enough cheating to throw the election.
Crickets.
Now just shut up about it, liar. Your pouty whining is really obnoxious.
Gee, imagine Suzie being wrong? The conservatives say that they stayed home and Romney lost. So, thank you very much conservatives!
BTW, Dan, great column.
I can’t help but liken this guy to Matt Drudge. Perhaps Chambers will use his fifteen seconds of fame to wrangle a job at Fox News?