If the polling is this wacky, why bother publishing it at all?
Over the weekend, ABC and the Washington Post published the results of a poll that made both operations look like its results were the product of a month-long exercise with a Magic 8-Ball. The way you know it was an embarrassment is the Post story about the poll began by telling us all we should probably ignore it completely.
The Post-ABC poll shows Biden trailing Trump by 10 percentage points at this early stage in the election cycle, although the sizable margin of Trump’s lead in this survey is significantly at odds with other public polls that show the general election contest a virtual dead heat. The difference between this poll and others, as well as the unusual makeup of Trump’s and Biden’s coalitions in this survey, suggest it is probably an outlier.
It was done entirely by phone. What person under, say, 60 answers an unknown call on their phone at this point? And if they left a voicemail to call them back, who would trust it? Basically, they’re getting extremely gullible people (i.e. mostly Trump voters) to respond to the poll.
I think the only way you can do successful polling at this point is focus groups with carefully selected demographics, and I would even be dubious there.
I participated in a few polls in 2020 and…yeah. I would pick them up because I was waiting for important calls. Why tf else would I pick up. I still get these calls sometimes, usually while waiting for a call back for a job.
Even if I did pick up the phone, which I doubt I would, I would think it was a scam.
I was waiting to hear back about a job then and answered a poll call about gambling. I very, very rarely gamble. And when I do it’s like $50 on blackjack or something cuz my friends want to go to the casino here. That was a fun call cuz my answers were like “never”, *rarely", “no”. Lol
Dunno why I felt the need to share. I’m still drunk from my friends birthday party last night I think lol
I’ve answered a poll about food security once when I was in Belgium. They were asking if goes many mean I’d skipped in the last month, if hunger was affecting my studies or work, if u was able to have vegetables or fruits in my diet …
I answered until the end because it just felt sad, I’m privileged and don’t have to worry about these issues but I wanted people working on the issue to have all the support needed.
It should also be said that polls are only responded to by people who a) have the time, and b) have something to say.
B alone is enough to make the respondents select for far more extreme than the average person. A also selects for… people who’ve got nothing else going on.
Because it’s very likely a scam or someone trying to sell me something. What is the advantage of answering one?
I do sometimes get important calls from some gov. office or something like that. As a example, I lost my wallet and a about a week later the office in charged of the found-lost things called to say someone had found it and I could pick it up.
But to be fair I only ever got 1 scam call and most people I know got the same one (Europolice scam last year)
Like, where I live scam/sell calls are just not a thing, so might be regional.
Buy yeah, thanks for the answer, I get you point now.
Shrooms have nothing to do with mass delusions. In fact, they may help cure them.
Yeah, a really stupid headline by someone who doesn’t understand mushrooms.
Probably ate a few grams at a party one time and had a panic attack.
The more relevant drug is probably “huffing sister’s farts while engaging in incest in back woods like perfect GOP voter”
Specifically you need to vote for Biden to avoid a Trump presidency. If you don’t give a shit about who is president, then I don’t know what to tell you. The realistic choice though is Trump or Biden and no one else is going to come close to having enough votes to get the Presidency, they’ll only play spoiler at this point and split the vote one way or the other.
Commenting to emphasize this for the people who weren’t paying attention in 2016. If you vote for an alternative to what would normally be your candidate, it’s pretty much the same as voting for their competitor. That is, if you vote for a third party alternative to Biden, you’re basically voting for Trump (and if you vote for a third party alternative to Trump, assuming he wins the primary, it’s like voting for Biden).
If there are no candidates running who you are happy with, but there is a candidate that you think would be especially destructive, you should vote for that candidates main competitor. Otherwise you’re contributing to the destructive candidate winning.
I voted for Bernie, and I love him, but I would probably vote for a cunt that I hate in hindsight to avoid Trump if I could go back. Not because I think it’s the right thing to do, I just know that so many people won’t do the right thing, that my doing the right thing actually becomes an overall negative. Ranked voting is the ultimate choice and would make this whole fucked up system so much better, but since the pieces of shit we call representation will never make that a reality here, the best option is to go with the lesser of two devils that you know the most idiots are going to gravitate to. Bernie should have won, but I know now that was never even possible and wish it had been Clinton.
That sounds like a Biden problem, DNC runs a weak shit candidate that no one wants to run, if he loses they are to blame.
Before I launch into a diatribe, I have a simple question that often works to separate rational arguments from articles of faith: What could someone say, what evidence could they give, to convince you that your assumption of the left as the problem in American electoral outcomes, is incorrect? Is there anything?
I live in NY. We’re unlikely to go red, and if we do, by some awful magic, there are bigger problems than my vote. I’m going to vote my conscience. And if I lived in a swing state, I’d vote for Biden. Though I will say, it’s getting harder to take people seriously when they keep blaming the left for their losses and not actually paying attention to their policy preferences. (I hope you realize Dem partisans have used this argument in every election of my lifetime…I’m 38.)
No party is owed one’s vote. It has to be earned with policies. The Dems couldn’t protect women (and other people with uteruses); I had to get my tubes removed to sleep at night when I visit family in the shittier states. When a mutual-defense pact fails to protect one of its largest and most powerful constituent groups, it naturally starts a slow collapse. Imagine where NATO would be if Russia bombed a German city and NATO “allies” did nothing. I used to make arguments like yours; I was a left-leaning Dem until my mid-20s. But in addition to the Dems’ repeated disappointments (repeatedly bringing policy papers to gunfights), climate change has made clear that there are times where selecting better or worse doesn’t matter, because both are inadequate.
I agree with you in that “we have to vote for Biden to avoid armageddon” is ridiculous. After all, we should aim higher than plainly “avoiding armageddon” because we see the Dems as an escape from the whatever the right see as this week’s Boogeyman. The Dems don’t care for social issues AT ALL, while still giving the rich and big corporations handouts.
What could someone say, what evidence could they give, to convince you that your assumption of the left as the problem in American electoral outcomes, is incorrect?
You could have read their comment before asking a BS leading question about something they never said in the first place. Why would you expect anyone to engage with your bad faith assumptions?
In any first past the post election anything more than 2 candidates means there is a spoiler.
Underestimating this discarded foreskin is what got us here in the first place.
Don’t get complacent.
This is deeply insulting to mushroom users, particularly given that people tend to be more empathetic because of those experiences, not less.
Shrooms specifically were a weird choice for the headline for sure. But it’s just another variation on “drugs make you stupid and only teetotallers have an accurate perception of the world”. It’s really no less offensive than if they’d gone with “only a woman would believe…” or “you’d have to be a middle-school dropout to believe…”. Like why? Why target some random group and call them out as idiots incapable of seeing what’s right in front of their faces, when it has absolutely 0 to do with the content of the article? You’d have to be on PCP to believe this is a good way to write a headline :D
