Pollster Mark Blumenthal's column today, “What Liberal Revolt?” echoes a column I wrote a couple weeks ago: “No Liberal Revolt Against Obama.” Blumenthal cites the same data and makes generally the same point: Obama retains liberal voters support. Politico's Ben Smith has picked up on the Blumenthal piece today. So we have a string of conventional wisdom pushback.

It evokes a lesson for the entire political press: bloggers/activists are not the same as voters! Leading activists views are news. But a small clan of prominent loud voices (often of the same demographic/ideological makeup) does not necessarily make a national trend. Think anti-Vietnam/anti-establishment college protests. They occurred on a minority of campuses and Nixon won youth in 1972. But America was told a national movement was underway. It's been clear for years that liberal bloggers, like Kos, are the heirs to those McGovernites.

Reporters have long had the bad habit of conflating prominent activist voices with the actual voters they claim to represent (sometimes the two agree, sometimes not). But this automatic conflation is indeed a vice. And that vice has been exacerbated in the age of blogging, since most (not-reported) political bloggers tend to be of the activist ilk—more radically liberal or conservative than the electorate at large. The problem is magnified as bloggers engage each other and write about their argument as if it is indicative of the national conversation. Reporters pick up on that conversation and we have a meme (to borrow a popular blog term). It's all so very insular and so very uninformative. And we could do with a great deal less of it.

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