- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
You must log in or # to comment.
The US is just baffling to me, working class people prefer Trump, a wealthy businessman (from the perspective of his voters/supporters) over Biden who is the most pro-union president in a long time.
It’s also crazy that the strategy of steering the slow-to-turn oil tanker that is the US economy towards a cliff during your turn as president and then chastise your opponent who takes over for damaging the tanker while desperately trying to navigate away from the cliff works cycle after cycle. Reagan, both Bushes and Trump are all guilty of racking up the defecit (with control of both houses and the presidency) while screaming fiscal responsibility and making sure that any collision will happen when they’re not in power or when they’re soon to lose it so the aftermath can be blamed on the Dems.
That’s because Republicans are masters at marketing a message that connects with average folks. They are absolutely terrible for those folks, but as you pointed out, the US economy is so massive, it takes time for legislation passed today to actually affect people in hometown America. So while Republicans are great at pretending they are all blue collar folks, Democrats are absolutely inept at explaining their policies to regular people. All those regular people see a bunch of Democratic lawmakers wasting their resources on teeny, tiny fringe groups. So regular people who represent large voting blocs that can get politicians elected watch this on the news and wonder when are Demcrats going to pay attention to their problems.
At my last company, we had a TV in the break room that was tuned to the news. Mind you, it wasn’t Fox News or any obvious garbage like that. I vividly remember seeing reports on the news on how all these Democratic politicians were spending all this time helping DACA people. They would promise them Healthcare and free education. I could hear my coworkers mumble to themselves. They just had to send in a fat check to their kid’s college to pay for classes while these DACA people were being promised free education. Regardless of of these coworkers supported the DACA folks or not, it just doesn’t look good to average voters when they are scraping together a tuition payment and the elected officials you helped get into office are telling these people who aren’t even citizens. It’s very tone-deaf when the masses have the same or similar problems and yet onky these fringe groups get visible attention from Democrats. And this is but one example of many similar instances which really help solidify the image thag Dems are out of touch, even if that isn’t true. In politics, image is more important than just about anything else.
Wait…. We’re still following polls a year out from elections?
Outlier.
I understand the idea of statistics but I do question calling 1006 people randomly on the phone and asking them, then applying the results to 150,000,000 people. But more importantly, national polls don’t take the electoral college into account.
Yeah, there’s a lot less randomness to it than you seem to think… Anything over a thousand is statistically usable, though not definitive.
That being said, there IS some inherent bias in the methods of some pollsters, such as calling landlines and only talking to people who pick up the first time, both of which skews the people polled older and more conservative than the general public.
Assuming for a moment that they got the popular vote as it stands now right, though, the EC is likely even worse, since it’s very much stacked in favor of the GOP…
Would the threshold of 1000 people be different if it was intended to represent say, 2,000,0000 vs 150,000,000? Why is 1,000 the magic number there? It seems like it would become more reliable with a larger sample size. And yeah, the population of people who answer unknown numbers with no warning and are willing to take a poll probably doesn’t represent the entire voting public accurately.
The EC is stacked in favor of the GOP due to smaller rural states, sure, but the extra dumb thing about the way it works in the US is that only about 10 states really matter. The rest are, of course, considered a sure win for one side or the other, and since the system is winner-takes-all, it’s not even worth campaigning or caring about how people on the other side vote in those states.
1000 is pretty much a compromise between the ideal and what’s realistically possible. Most opinion polls have a sample size between 800 and 1500, with those under 1k considered much less reliable, around 1k pretty much standard and 1500 extra rigorous.
There’s a lot of technical details on how to select those 800-1500 people to be reliably representative of a much larger population and different poll takers use different methodology, but that’s all too deep in the weeds for a lemmy reply and some of it is outside the scope of my knowledge as a curious and thus pretty well-informed layperson.
And you’re absolutely right about the EC on all counts. That and the filibuster are both examples of a supposed democracy being EXTREMELY undemocratic.
