"I don't trust the facts!"  That line comes from a man at a Palin rally in Carson City, in "heated" discussion with an Obama volunteer.  It's at the end of an extremely insightful post by Sean Quinn over at FiveThirtyEight.com.

I'm tempted to just quote the whole thing.  That might not be fair use (ahem), so here's enough to give you a flavor.

Monday, September 15, 2008 Dems Must Give Voters Explicit Permission To Like Palin Because they already do. That ship has sailed. When facts are used to discredit Sarah Palin, emotion trumps facts. The instinct is to defend against the facts. Consider: you meet someone and like him or her on a gut level. A stranger – someone who doesn’t have built-up personal credibility with you – gives you a list of reasons not to like that person. How do you react?

On an emotional level, you want them to be wrong, and you will take every possible favorable inference on the likable person’s behalf. Using facts is pushing a big rock uphill. You might get it to the top with a few voters, but you’re going to expend a lot of energy for only a little return.

There’s a giant disconnect between all the gleeful Democratic claims of this or that magic bullet and the genuine, instant “Blink”-style emotional connection Palin has made with so many voters who see themselves in her. The Sarah Palin Phenomenon is not about facts – it’s about an emotional gut reaction to someone who has charisma and reflects something essentially common and real about themselves.

Emotion is something Republicans have understood for many cycles. George Bush’s Ohio 2004 closing “argument” Ashley ad, which simply featured Bush hugging a teenage girl who’d lost her mom on 9/11, underscored this expertise in emotional messaging. Re-watch that ad and notice the line toward the end: "I saw what I want to see." You can't talk people out of emotional certainty.

Quinn continues with some strategies to defuse this problem.

To defuse the Sarah Palin Phenomenon, Democrats need to explicitly give voters permission to both like her as a person and then also not vote for her.

Exactly.  Quinn then proceeds to describe some ways we might do that.  Not sure if his answers are the best, but that's what we're here for.

Discuss.