"But that testimony doesn't add up. How come state party chairmen report 0.1% opposition while a sampling on FR shows it at 27.7%? This sounds more like repeating the "party line" rather than true testimony of experience."
Spot on.
The party apparatus, obviously, is going to support the party chief. One way to do that is to try and make the opposition look small: a bunch of deranged bitter-enders.
Of course, when playing the disinformation game, it is crucial to be credible. If you depress the numbers too low, like this absurd "It's running 10-to-1000, so it's all liberal hype", you lose all credibility. Really it makes things worse. Because there is that 1/4 to 1/3 who already oppose the nomination, and they know they're not bitter-enders. And when you have Limbaugh and Hannity, Coulter and Ingraham, Will and others - the whole panoply of conservative punditry that matters and have massive audiences - all saying the same thing as the 1/4 to 1/3, if a bunch of state party chairmen tell you that opposition is running at 1%, you know a few things:
(1) They're lying. Not just "mistaken". Outright lying. The opposition is too large, too vocal, too OBVIOUS, and too many of us feel it and see it and show it, and know others who do.
(2) They're spinning. Ineffectively.
(3) They're serving a particular interest in the party, and willing to calumnate a quarter to a third of the party in order to serve that interest.
(4) They're scared. When the gates slam down and the leadership is giving a coordinated response like that - which is obviously untrue, even ridiculous - the folks doing this are using the regular playbook, and find that not only it isn't working, but it is making things worse.
I tell ya, I probably would have been in the "not sure yet" category without the heavy-handed and dishonest tactics used to generate support for the nomination. But what those tactics tell me is that if the truth were laid bare I wouldn't like it at all.