A Village full of Very Serious People
by digby
Where being wrong means never having to say you’re sorry — or give up your lucrative job:
Why Washington is the best town to be wrong in. http://t.co/eGjzCfWILS
— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) August 21, 2014
If the name doesn’t ring a bell, maybe you know his work. He’s the Republican pollster who predicted just weeks before the June election that then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) would win his primary by 34 points. This week, Cantor packed up his Capitol Hill office, having lost that election by 10 points.
“The worst part of it is, you build a relationship with a longtime friend and you never want to lose,” McLaughlin says now, noting that he has not seen Cantor — a client for almost 15 years — since before that fateful night. “That’s a loss that you never get over.”
That might be especially true if you were a young Republican congressman climbing the ranks of leadership, as Cantor was. For McLaughlin, the anguish may be real, the embarrassment may keep him up at night, but his employment status? That hasn’t changed.
“We got attacked right after it,” he says, adding that he didn’t lose any of his current clients running in the 2014 cycle. “There was a feeding frenzy of people calling up all our clients asking if they would continue to use us. But they stuck by us.”
He’s just a pollster. But the same holds true if you are an economist, policy analyst, military tactician or top political strategist. They take care of each other. Which is nice. For them.
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