Especially when the same lies and half-truths are repeated over and over and over.
That’s a tactic, not an accident. Repeat the same claim over and over to get it wedged into memory as if it had supporting evidence when it never did.
For example, implying that because McConnell “told a truth” that it was not also deliberately deceptive.
McConnell compared a subset to the whole. He did this on purpose because comparing the subsets to each other shows that the GOP is supressing minority votes, while comparing the subset to the whole hides the numbers in a larger pool.
Many willfully malevolent people like this frame, because it allows uninformed people to support their deliberate malice.
It is deceptive, and it is not an accident. The uninformed can’t detect the deception. And that’s why the malevolent use it.
It’s simple deception by math. Look, we can hide half of the effect by diluting the difference in the larger pool of numbers and then declare that the effect is small. Throw on a couple of layers of paint and you’ll never notice that dent.
And the uninformed will let themselves look only at the paint and call it a “truth.”
The GOP is clever enough — if "clever" is an appropriate word to describe blatantly criminal malice — to suppress black votes without legislation that explicitly contains the word "black."
And conservatives and racists have been doing this in America since the beginning. The “poll taxes” and the “poll tests” were all designed to do this. This is so well known that the malevolent have to resort to the repetition of the deception to maintain it. And the uninformed help them by hugging their prejudices tighter than their reason.
One of the "cleverest" things the GOP did several years ago was a computer search to find duplicated names. If a "Robert J. Williams" was noticed in one state and someone of the same name in a different state, BOTH names could be flagged and the voters could be turned away on Election Day. It is easy to apply such laws selectively. ("Of course we know you're OK, Bobby Joe! This don' apply to good ol' boys like y'all!")
Believe it or don't this duplicate name detection is inherently biased against Blacks. Among the five most common surnames in the U.S., 22.2% of Smiths are Black, 33.8% of Johnsons, 34.5% of Browns, 37.7% of Joneses and a whopping 46.7% of Williamses are Blacks. (Some QOP analyst probably got a free ride at the Trump-Epstein joy ranch for this clever insight.)
And they have many many more.
It can be seen in the size and number of polling stations. The IDs considered acceptable, the number and placement of locations to get IDs, the hours of the polling stations, the poll watcher actions. The acts to deprive citizens of the right to vote and the purges of voting rolls.
And they are quantified in the comparison of the number of black or minority voters turned away from voting versus the number of white voters. And that strong signal can be hidden by comparing minority voters to the whole pool, thereby subtracting the suppression of minority votes from the signal. Not an accident. But repeated again and again by those who either want to deceive or those too uninformed to detect the deception, but whose support is needed to enact the suppression.
Mitch McConnel deceived, on purpose, by using inapproriate data. The data was “true,” but misused, and therefore a decpetion.
Some people fell for it. Some celebrated the chance to deceive while claiming deniability. And both of those groups enabled voter suppression.