Kevin Drum calls attention to a recent poll from Public Policy Polling: “52% of Republicans now think that ACORN stole the 2008 election from John McCain.”
The table he posts is well worth a quick glance. Drum also hits the nail on the head:
There aren’t words for this. Something like 40 million Republicans are now convinced that ACORN (!) somehow managed to steal an election that McCain lost by seven percentage points. Another 20 million think they might have stolen it but aren’t sure. The Fox/Limbaugh/Palin axis, which probably directly reaches maybe 10 million people on a regular basis, has nonetheless convinced six times that number to buy into a conspiracy theory that makes the Area 51 crowd look sane by comparison.
I can’t really do better than that. I can however take a moment to knock down the predictable criticism that shows up in the comments for Drum’s post: “C’mon, Drum. A big chunk of the Democratic base think Diebold stole the 2004 election for Bush. And before that, the Supreme Court.” That’s commenter MacGruber in pole position to open the comments section.
It’s pretty difficult to compare 2008 to 2004. As Kevin points out, Obama won his election by over 7%; that translates to over 9.5 million votes. In ‘04, by comparison, Bush squeaked out reelection by less than 2.5%, or just 3 million votes. To look at it in another, even more damning way, Obama won his election on the strength of 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173. In sports we call that a rout. The 2004 election was nothing of the sort: George Bush scraped together 286 electoral votes to best Kerry’s 251, a much closer election all around. (See Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections for additional data.)
On the basis of these numbers alone, it’s disingenuous to suggest that ACORN–or any other organization–could have wielded any sort of significant influence on the ‘08 results.
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