Polling Guru Silver Reflects On Right-Winger Curse Out

Over at FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver digs down a little deeper into his recent awkward interview with John Ziegler, who had Zogby put a poll out in the field in an attempt to prove that Obama voters were, by nature, uninformed about politics. That interview ended with Ziegler givin' Silver the Cheney!

SILVER: Thank you, have a good day.

ZIEGLER: Go fuck yourself.

Woo! Banter! Anyhoo, today, Silver did his best to get some sort of appreciation of Ziegler's response to his interview, and the thought process behind the poll. "I didn't quite get how someone like Ziegler, who is usually fairly poised, who solicited me to interview him, who has years of experience in the media, could so completely lose his cool," Silver confessed. He found insight, as many do, in the writings of the late David Foster Wallace, who profiled Ziegler in 2005, when he was the man behind the microphone on an L.A. talk radio program:

Hosting talk radio is an exotic, high-pressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don't have names.

To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want--with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential--a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you're saying--which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you're speaking.) Plus, ideally, what you're saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners...

[Aside: DFW continues at length about those talk radio skills, and it's well worth checking out. His shortcomings aside, it gives the reader a good appreciation for the extraordinary skills Ziegler does possess.]

From there, Silver teases out a little macro-analysis:

Moreover, almost uniquely to radio, most of the audience is not even paying attention to you, because most people listen to radio when they're in the process of doing something else. (If they weren't doing something else, they'd be watching TV). They are driving, mowing the lawn, washing the dishes -- and you have to work really hard to sustain their attention. Hence what Wallace refers to as the importance of "stimulating" the listener, an art that Ziegler has mastered. Invariably, the times when Ziegler became really, really angry with me during the interview was when I was not permitting him to be stimulating, but instead asking him specific, banal questions that required specific, banal answers. Those questions would have made for terrible radio! And Ziegler had no idea how to answer them.

Stimulation, however, is somewhat the opposite of persuasion. You're not going to persuade someone of something when you're (literally, in Ziegler's case) yelling in their ear.

The McCain campaign was all about stimulation. The Britney Spears ads weren't persuasive, but they sure were stimulating! "Drill, baby, drill" wasn't persuasive, but it sure was stimulating! Sarah Palin wasn't persuasive, but she sure was...stimulating!

Let me shorthand the entire election for you. Stimulation will win you news cycles, all of them. But it's persuasion that wins elections.

RELATED:
Zogby's Misleading Poll of Obama Voters [Wall Street Journal]

ALSO:
The title of Silver's post is "Did Talk Radio Kill Conservatism." With that in mind, please recall the final paragraph of this post.

Comments

[hangdogit]

Right-wingers have all sorts of irrational beliefs that do not work in the real world:

- That abstinence-only education will work for teenagers (see Palin family)
- That trickle-down economics does anything but destroy the middle class
- That tax cuts are good in recession to stimulate the economy but also good in better times because "its your money -- not the government's"
- There is no need to reduce abortions -- just eliminate them
- That fighting in Iraq protects us from terrorism (instead of increasing it)
- That conservatism is the only valid point of view -- all others must be destroyed
- That in 2008 they can win by carrying "the base"
- That deregulating business is prudent and wise -- it will "unleash" the economy
(COUNTLESS MORE -- ADD YOUR OWN)

[magen]

Right-wingers heads always explode when their fantasies are confronted with contradictory facts and data.

Their policies are all based on ideas that have been proven to not work.

[kgb999]

Added caveat: persuasion will only work when people make a decision to ignore the stimulation and pay attention to the debate.

I don't necessarily know if most people do that under normal circumstances. That's why the GOP has gotten away with all the crap they've pulled - all they had to do was yell what they wanted people to believe loud enough and that was enough. Things had to get pretty bad for the nation to reach a "persuadable moment".

[Skeetshooter]

Is talk radio killing conservatism? That's a thought provoking question which, if talk radio is designed to stimulate without informing, would have no place on talk radio. The very nerve of the question, to provoke the host rather than the listener! The humility and self abnegation needed to allow those word to be uttered in the presence of the massive egos involved would rend the fabric of space time themselves, destroying the parallel universe that is talk radio.

Or, -and this is a hypothesis I intend to pose to Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, it might perhaps be a step toward reconciling talk radio with the reality the rest of us live with when we're not being seduced by the gingerbread house that is talk radio.

[Rog49Thomas]

Nate, you wouldn't expect a donkey to sing opera.

[Mattyhorn]

The facts are simple: Nate Silver has earned more credibility in roughly a year of forecasting political polls than Ziegler has learned in his dubious career as part of the mainstream media (Yep, I said it.). Ziegler has failed at every media job he's held, so now he feels the need to bash the very media off which he lived for so long.

John Ziegler is by far the rustiest tool in the right-wing extremist shed.

[AllenD]

Dear John Zeigler:

SCOREBOARD

Love:

Barack Obama

[bazokbros]

This poll Ziegler/Zogby conducted does seem skewed in the wording to provide a specific response for a candidate and it that sense it is somewhat misleading. However part of this article is talking about how Americans were influenced by misleading information.

The scary thing is all the congressional representatives that used false information and propaganda that went on talk shows and used the media to try speak negatively about Obama (i.e. Michele Bachmann suggesting Obama was anit-American and launched his campaign in Ayer's living room) are the same ones that have the power to vote "Yea" to war resolutions and sell this to the American people.

[SimJack]

Good on ya, Nate! I thought your polls were comprehensive and about as statistically accurate and unbiased as any I've seen. Compared to the others, yours was the bellweather. I also think it's interesting, and disturbing, that the certain members of the right just can't deal with facts, that they despise those with intelligence who would use it for good to inform society in a positive and realistic way. Apparently they do not believe the adage that the truth shall set us free or, that knowledge is power. That they squander their personal power and potential for learning is their demise and extremely unfortunate for our society and civilization as a whole. Anyway Nate, Atta boy, keep doing the good thing!.

[Witchitalineman]

I like this young man. Keep up the good work Nate!

[DaOne]

Ziegler is a loser and always has been. I love how KFI totally cut off his legs.

[JerryTheAngel]

Still Got Rage? Get an 8 year prescription of Valium to help get you through this nightmare that you are going through.

[DaOne]

No rage at all. I just love how they clipped the loser. The fact that he hasn't resurfaced to any great degree pretty much tells you how "talented" he is.

You feel free to grab that valium though.

[Northlite]

As a daily visitor to Nate's site(and of course Huff) for the last year plus, I was consistently impressed with Nate's ability to see the forest and not just the trees. While he is a liberal Dem, he never let ideology or dislike of a candidate get in the way of his analysis, as he stuck to his professional values and his higher ideals, like an interest in really understanding an issue.

I must admit he sometimes calmed me down when I would get angry at Hillary during the primaries and even recently his explanation of Obama's willingness to save Joe Liebermann. That is, he gives people the benefit of the doubt and by using facts/numbers gives us insight.

[Loki11467]

Fact is McCain used to be a straight talker who then decided to sel his soul and become crooked. When he was told this by the press he got furious and he challenged them which he should not of done. Its no different than what Gary Hart did. Some people are very self destructive. Best man won.

[diogeron]

Re: McCain "selling his soul."

So did Robert Johnson, but McCain never even learned how to play the guitar.

[NeoLiberal]

Ziegler's behavior and reactions are psychologically attributable to the proverbial "cornered animal."

He was faced with indisputable facts and could not support his own positions; he was so beholden to an ideology or mindset that he could not see the facts before him. Consequently, he lashed out in defense.

People who don't have words to defend their positions, use epithets and anger and (sometimes) violence to end the discussion or confrontation.

Nate Silver rocks!

[mamacat]

There is a common quote attributed to Karl Rove, the infamous neo-con strategist, along the lines of "The more education a person has, the more likely they are to vote Democratic."

That pretty much says it all.