A filtered group that is selected to be favorable toward the representative, not hostile to him.

If they can’t even get their filtered group to overwhelmingly support their positions, it seems unlikely that a general sampling of the population would.

That’s one of those paradoxes with human behavior around problems. If you put in effort to resolve the problem before it becomes significant, either no one notices, or they claim your effort was unnecessary because it wasn’t a problem in the first place.

Y2K bugs are a great example. Lots of effort, time, and money was spent ahead of time to prevent it from becoming a problem…and you get people claiming the whole thing was just nothing to be worried about at all and the expense was pointless.