Much attention has been lavished on this Molly Ball piece in The Atlantic on the centrist think tank Third Way’s listening tour across America. In it, Ms. Ball subtly fillets the Third Way’s domestic anthropologists in their search for answers that already align with the group’s preconceptions about a fundamentally centrist, moderate America that wants small government, local control and even-tempered politicians in line with the preferences of the group’s corporate donors. Per her story, the focus groups seemed to show one thing, but the conclusions from Third Way showed another.
But the reason I write this is to highlight something more disturbing from the piece that speaks to the Third Way’s methodology in doing the research. CONT.
David Atkins, Washington Monthly