#26 - A recent poll showed that almost half of the city’s

[Adam Tyson]

Here's what we said in the official explanation about answer C, Puppy:

Answer choice (C): If a fifth of those polled were not aware of the ethics violation accusations, that
means that four fifths of those surveyed were aware. This does not resolve the paradox, which is that
Walker’s poll numbers have not dropped despite the accusations.

The paradox is that despite the alleged ethics violations, the Mayor's support remains the same as it was beforehand. The Mayor has not lost any supporters, even though almost half of the city thinks they did something wrong. Answer C does nothing to help explain why their support did not drop, but only why a subset of the supporters were not affected by the news (they never heard the news). What about the rest of the supporters who did hear about the violations? Only answer A helps - it tells us that the supporters simply don't believe the accusations.

[Dancingbambarina]

Surely E would prove that the poll numbers didn't decrease because he defended himself. Surely E should be taken seriously on the grounds that the voters can blame the staff and still vote for him because it wouldn't be his fault?

Thank you

[Dave Killoran]

Surely E would prove that the poll numbers didn't decrease because he defended himself. Surely E should be taken seriously on the grounds that the voters can blame the staff and still vote for him because it wouldn't be his fault?

Thank you

I'd say that here you've fallen into a variant of the Natural Question Error: https://blog.powerscore.com/lsat/lsat-l ... ion-error/.

We see that a politician is associated with ethics violations, and of course one question that comes up is whether the person is guilty. Answer choice (E)--well-placed at the end--comes in and suggests that hey, these were just honest errors by staff. That answers the question of guilt, which would seem to help. The problem is, it doesn't matter. We are trying to find out why poll numbers didn't change, and the stimulus makes it clear that "almost half of the city’s residents believe that Mayor Walker is guilty of ethics violations" [italics added]. So the explanation is irrelevant because those people believe Walker is guilty despite any explanation. Once you see that, it tells you that the explanation in (E) isn't giving any lens into why the numbers didn't change before and after the accusations.

It's an attractive wrong answer choice, but as always, since you know it is wrong, study why LSAC is saying it's wrong.

Thanks!

[teddykim100]

To anyone confused about (E) I have some insight -

Mayor Walker defends himself from the accusations, which is not the same as conceding to or admitting, but justifying his actions, which is what I think most of us who picked (E) conflated it to be.


If he admits to his guilt then that might open the door to the pollsters simultaneously acknowledging his guilty, while also believing he's still a good mayor. But E isn't saying that - E is saying he's defending himself, which would be very different from conceding or admitting guilt.

With a defense, we can't really say whether the public would be sympathetic to him like they would be if he just admitted things. And to be clear, him admitting guilt doesn't really move the needle either; we would have to see clearly how his admission connects to any approval rating. But hopefully you can see how conflating the idea of defending vs. admitting touches upon the misunderstanding here.

So E is a trap answer based on our degree of understanding

[Dana D]

Hey Teddy,

I would push back a little here to reiterate with Dave said in his earlier explaination -almost half of the voters believe the Mayor is guilty, regardless of whether this was a result of intentional bad acting or honest mistakes. So we still have to answer the question of why 52% of voters think he's great? The way to actually resolve this paradox is to recognize that there could be two totally distinct parties here - a group that thinks he's guilty and even before this thought he was doing a poor job (48% of voters) and a group that thinks he's doing great (52%).

Hope that helps!