All can see you make your decisions based on polling data, which is the same as saying you make your decisions based on what other people think. Or what you think they think.
That is your prerogative. It may even help ease the pain as you witness the country march along the pathway of historic inevitability.
I make decisions based on an evaluation of all the information; if I based my decision on polls, I would have supported GIngrich when all the Gingrich folks said he was the clear candidate because he was polling so well.
As I said, people love polls when they say what they like, and then argue against them when they reflect an inconvenient truth.
Polls can be manipulated, so they aren’t the only fact you can use to make a decision, but they are not as wrong as people like to claim when they are bad for their candidate. People who rail at polls usually don’t have any good arguments to make.
But in the matter of which conservative to support, the right thing for everybody to do was to pay attention to what other people thought. The goal was to find a sufficiently conservative candidate who could get broad enough support to beat Romney. “broad enough support” means that we cared what everybody thought. So long as 20% supported each of 5 candidates, we weren’t going to beat ROmney.
I would have preferred Rick Perry to be the last man standing against Romney. I Think if Rick PErry had been in Santorum’s place in february, that Perry would actually be beating Romney now. But that would only happen if other people supported him, and that was entirely dependent on what “other people think”.
But I was happy enough with Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich that, if enough people had thought they were good enough, I would have supported them in order to beat Romney. So yes, I was looking at what other people thought. Unfortunately, in Florida “other people” thought they didn’t like GIngrich, and he failed. And then in February a lot of people thought not to vote for Gingrich.
And people started voting for Santorum — so because of “what people think”, Santorum had a shot, but then people started ‘thinking’ that he didn’t, and they voted how they thought, and now we are stuck with Romney.
Elections are all about what “other people think”. If we had all been willing to make our decisions based in part on what other people thought, we might have ended up with a good conservative candidate.