Bernie Sanders, defying the polls, won the primary election in Michigan. Five Thirty Eight, the blog that is all about the polls, wonders what this means. Could it be that their polls won’t accurately predict the results of coming primaries?
I’ll tell you what it means.
Ignore the goddamn motherfucking polls.
It doesn’t make a speck of difference if Nate Silver correctly predicts, or incorrectly predicts, how a future election will turn out, unless you’ve got a bet riding on it. The media ought to be discussing policies and plans, not how good their oracle is at predicting the margin of victory. THAT DOESN’T MATTER.
All I hear about in the political news, aside from reporting on spectacular gaffes, is poll numbers. It’s that stupid obsession that is one of the factors wrecking American politics — I’m not going to vote for someone because they lead in a poll, although apparently some people do. I’m going to vote for someone on the basis of what they promise to do.
I used to do these pointless poll posts, sending readers off to mess with these dumb click-baity online polls, but I stopped. The point was to show that these things are totally pointless, and don’t reflect anything of significance…but people started thinking they were an end in themselves. They weren’t. The same thing has happened to the news — polling has consumed ideas completely.
What I would like to see is a complete ban on speculation about who is winning on the news. Imagine a broadcast where Wolf Blitzer was totally silenced because he wasn’t able to portentiously declare that Candidate X was leading Candidate Y by Z percent in Bumbledump County, Nebraska, but instead had to say something about the issues in Bumbledump County and how X and Y would address them. It would completely change the dynamics of the news. It would suddenly require that Wolf Blitzer know something and have the intelligence to comment on it, beyond saying that 53 is bigger than 47.
So it’ll never happen.
I also wish that Five Thirty Eight would die in a catastrophic server meltdown.
Seeing that all media is owned by gigantic corporations, and each broadcast of anything called “news” is in fact a marketing press release…
It’s a wonder we don’t get bog-standard PowerPoint presentations every night. They’d be designed to shovel massive amounts of “data” at us, with the goal of revealing no information whatsoever.
“I’m going to vote for someone on the basis of what they promise to do.”
Trouble is, they probably won’t do it if elected, because reasons…
I’m pretty sure you posted in the last month or so declaring your intent to vote for whichever non-Republican is leading in the polls regardless of what they promise/intend to do.
Yes! There are reasons that democracy need SECRET ballots. This problem is one of them.
Also, voting is NOT betting on who will win; its CHOOSING who you WANT to win.
Thank you kindly.
And by defying the Washington Compost’s attempts at character assassination, sixteen negative articles in the span of sixteen hours.
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories-bernie-sanders-16-hours
I’m a big fan of 538, but perhaps only because I find “horse-race” politics fun to track (especially when the Republicans are tearing themselves apart). Polling probably isn’t terribly useful for public consumption (and could even be harmful in some cases), but it’s extremely useful for political campaigns when determining how to utilize resources. It’s also useful for politicians to determine public support for various policies.
@Jake Harban #3
Really? You think there’s no correlation at all between party affiliation and what policies the candidates support?
@5
How is this not clickbait? The article is literally “bernie and trump pronounce a word kind of similar”
Jake Harban@3: “whichever non-republican is leading in the polls” — not my recollection. I recall PZ intending to vote for the Democrat that wins the primary.
I am absolutely sick of people comprimising on their principles when casting their vote. “I prefer candidate X, but he isn’t polling well. I will vote for Y on that basis, and the fear that Z might win otherwise.” The single biggest reason progressive candidates are seen as being so risky is that people make that compromise all the time, which leads to progressive candidates recieving few votes each cycle, which leads to the perception that progressive candidates are risky, which leads to the compromise again next cycle…
Polls are the vital contributor to that cycle, and it leads to business as usual in politics.
Your recollection is poor. He stated he would vote for Bernie in the primaries, then whichever Democrat wins the nomination in the general.
Yes. I don’t care about the polls or “electability”, whatever that is: in the primaries I voted on the issues I care about. I’ll do likewise next November, making my decision because Republican policies are disasters, while Democratic policies are…less disastrous.
But even if something awful happens, and the pollsters tell me Trump is going to win a landslide victory, I won’t vote for him.
Is Harban always this stupid?
I’m stating the obvious but poll numbers do matter when it comes to strategic voting. Of course, when there are only two candidates there is no point in strategic voting but say if Cruz wins the nomination, Trump decides to do an independent run, Hillary wins the other nomination, and finally say Elizabeth Warren also decides to do another independent run, then it is completely reasonable to look at the poll numbers and vote for a less desirable candidate who is more electable according to the polls.
@12 The example I was thinking of is the Republican primary. Suppose you’re a “moderate” Republican voter and are trying to decide between Rubio and Kasich. Their respective positions in polls might influence your decision if you’re trying to avoid splitting the vote and letting the candidate you really don’t want to win in. Or, in an example where it did happen, consider Canada’s experience with the Liberals, the NDP, and Harper. Voting for the less desirable but more likely to win candidate to get Harper out turned out to be a reasonable strategy there.
“I’m not going to vote for someone because they lead in a poll, although apparently some people do. I’m going to vote for someone on the basis of what they promise to do.”
“in the primaries I voted on the issues I care about. I’ll do likewise next November”
Then shouldn’t you vote for Green party or something? Since, I imagine, their policies are much more in line with your own. Otherwise, aren’t you too falling victim to the polling game you’re trying to deride?
[Note I would never vote Hillary over Trump, I’d revert back to Green if Bernie loses]
I think you can fault the media for focusing on the horse-race so much, but that’s kind of the whole premise of 538, isn’t it? They aggregate polls and try to get an accurate read and prediction on things. If that annoys you, then obviously 538 isn’t going to be your cup of tea.
Though there’s no reason for the mainstream media to focus so much on polls. But television news is always so substance free. When they aren’t talking about polls, they’re talking about mannerisms and made-up scandals and sex and nonsense. They do everything they can to not talk about substance. It’s almost like the mainstream media is terrible.
They aren’t viable, meaning electable, and the non-vote for a democrat is essentially a vote for a rethuglican. Voting for a non-viable candidate when there is great evil to be avoid is selfishness.
Well, I try to do my bit against the pollsters – I always vote, but I never respond to their polls. I hung up on three people who at least claimed to be pollsters just in the last couple of weeks. Partly because it is none of their business how I plan to vote, but mostly because they are so annoying about it.
Even if I approved of polling, most of them seem to be “push polls” anyway, where they are just trying to ask leading questions to get people to think a certain way, and aren’t actually collecting any data in the first place. But even the actual polls abuse peoples patience so badly (“Oh, this will only take a couple of minutes . . .” gradually turns into what seems like half an hour of answering increasingly inane questions), that I’m really surprised that they get any responses at all that aren’t just people yanking their chains.
I would love to vote for a Green candidate! Only there aren’t any in any of my local elections.
It’s not just about electing a president. It’s about electing a body of people who will advance my views. When the Green party does a better job of organizing at many levels, rather than just running Jill Stein at the top of the race, I probably would caucus for them.
Living in a multi-party system, I did pay attention to the polls because it was important to me that Harper didn’t win. Unfortunately they don’t do a lot of riding by riding polls so I didn’t have anything to go by when I cast my ballot. Fortunately one of my two choices won, so even though I voted for the other one I was still happy.
Only if you live in a swing state.
That whichever Democrat wins the nomination will be the non-Republican leading in the polls is pretty much a foregone conclusion.
My point is that the position of “ignore polls, vote wholly on principle” is inconsistent with the position of “vote for whichever of the two top-polling candidates you find least offensive.”
Or in other words, the polls say they aren’t doing very well.
So if offered the choice between Trump, Clinton, and a third candidate considerably better than Clinton, who would you vote for?
Here we go again.
I’ve voted write-in before.
Many times, in fact— where I live, local “elections” are usually a meaningless formality with one candidate running unopposed.
Polling sounds like a mix of reality tv, marketing, and social science. That’s like mixing three different flavors of shit (bat, cat, and rat) and expecting the results to be chocolate mousse.
@23: I consider these two scenarios different:
Scenario One: There are two candidates who might get elected. One is a bit better than the other in my opinion. The less desirable candidate is leading in the polls, with 52% of people saying that they’ll vote for that candidate versus 44% saying they’ll vote for my preferred candidate. Both candidates are from parties that have won in the past and both have a major organization behind them, both in terms of funds and in terms of people.
Scenario Two: There are three candidates who might get elected. Candidate 1 is a disaster that I would never vote for. Candidate 2 is someone I consider okay, but not great as a candidate. I agree with candidate 3 on most issues. Candidate 2 has a strong organization behind them and a track record of winning elections and doing reasonably good things in their past political life, though, again, by no means a perfect record. Candidate 3 has only a small organization behind them and has little or no experience in an actual governing position, having not won any national level election. Their party has never won a national level election and there is nothing about this election that makes me think that this time will be different. Currently, polls show that 48% of people support candidate 1, 49% candidate 2, about 1% candidate 3, and the rest undecided or refused to say.
I would vote for my “preferred candidate” in scenario 1 but the “realistic” candidate in scenario 2*. Because one candidate has a chance, the other is a pipe dream.
*For the purposes of the illustration, I’m assuming I live in a “swing state” and that my vote really does count for something. If I live in New York or Texas, the calculation changes again and giving candidate 3 the vote so that they can do unexpectedly well, even if that means getting 3% not 1%, is then worth doing.
So I guess in the end, I’m influenced by polls in all sorts of ways. Sorry, PZ, I’m a terrible minion.
@24
I’m not sure if I’m grokking you there, and apologies if I’m misinterpreting you, but how is social science comparable to shit?
Marketing is also actually really complicated, hard, and can be valuable. Do it badly and it’s shitty for everyone involved. Do it amorally and it’s shitty for society at large.
As do I, but it’s not only a question of which candidates have what chances to win, but what they all say.
That is, the closer the “lesser” evil is to the greater, the more willing I am to vote for a long shot third party. In particular, there are some lines I refuse to cross; for example, I will never vote for a candidate who supports torture, even if that means voting for the Candidate 3 from your Scenario 2.
Michigan has form for this: Jesse Jackson won the Dem primary, as did George Wallace (over McGovern) and Ted Kennedy (over the incumbent Carter). Good for Michiganders, they seem to go for the underdogs. In the long scheme of things, it’s a blip, no matter what happens …
@20 Dunc writes:
If polling stops being reliable, how are you going to know whether you live in a swing state or not? Now they’re talking about Trump upending the political map, which may mean that none of the assumptions we normally make about which states are winnable are going to apply.
Yeah, at this point a vote for Jill Stein is definitely a vote for Trump in my book. Remember Nader?
If you live in a state that’s gone for the same party by a margin of at least 10% for two or more decades, you probably don’t live in a swing state.
If polling is that unreliable, how can you claim any candidate is “viable” or not? You might as well claim a vote for Clinton is definitely a vote for Trump.
Vermonters will vote for Sanders until the cows come home.
New Yorkers will buy the Brooklyn Bridge before they vote for Trump.
Texas will secede before they vote for Sanders.
Alaskans can see votes for Trump from their houses.
This probably will get lost among the exchanges about the value of polls, social science, etc., but here goes anyway:
IMO, the obsession with poll numbers is a symptom of the American obsession with competition. Who’s a winner? Who’s a loser? Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing. The “I want to vote for a winner” phenomenon is another symptom of the same disease. So is Donald Trump’s candidacy, at least to some extent.
Voting for Y to keep X from winning is called “tactical voting”. The best recent-ish example I can think of was here in France, when the elder Le Pen came second in the presidential vote some years ago. Under France’s system, that means the run-off was between an undisputed nazi and an eejit. The advice was to hold your nose (a clothespin was famously suggested) and vote for the eejit — it was far more important to keep Le Pen out than to sit home and pout because the “socialist” candidate polled third and hence was not in the run-off.
Vivec@#26 –
Well, based on some of the arguments about whether philosophy is any good I’ve been thinking about what science is and my understanding of science has broadened. Otherwise, a year ago, I would have scare-quoted “science” – I don’t think that a lot of the social science research is very good science, it seems to me to be more like a bunch of cargo cultists that have a vague idea of the forms of the scientific method but… I don’t want to be unfair to the cargo cultists. When I was an undergrad (I have a degree in psych) I was kind of unimpressed by the studies being performed and since then it’s only gotten worse. The stuff you may or may not have seen about the reproducibility problem in social sciences studies, or that social sciences studies are mostly measuring college undergrads – those are shots below the waterline as far as I am concerned. Yes, there are areas where interesting and good work is being done but it seems to me to be on the coat-tails of more objective research – neuroscience, for example.
Specifically the reason I listed social science on my dismissive comment about polling is because, well, duh, there’s sampling bias all over the place in those polls. It wasn’t very long ago that some pollster realized that they might be getting skewed responses because they were calling people with landlines and lots of millenials and wealthy people don’t have landlines or don’t answer landlines or depend on caller ID. And they realized that their poll was garbage. That’s just an example of one of my myriad ways that a poll can be complete garbage in, garbage out. They taught us about that a lot when I was an undergrad but I guess that polling has been thrown into a turmoil by cell phones since then. And by the internet. And again and again.
I will say this much for polling: it’s better than reading the entrails of a dog. I like dogs.
Well, I disagree (every potential field I’m pursuing is a social science), but It’s not really a hill I want to die on and I don’t think it’ll end in productive conversation, so I’ll bow out and agree that you’re perfectly free to think they’re not particularly good science.
The difficulty disappears if one is smart enough to understand that what is being advocated is “ignore popularity contest, vote on reasonably anticipated results.”
Living in California, I rarely get the chance to vote my choice in the primary. My candidates almost always get driven out long before June. It’d be nice if the whole country could hold primaries on the same day. That would reduce the influence of the polls AND make the whole election cycle shorter. But of course the owners of pancake houses in Iowa and New Hampshire can’t allow that.
If we assume (and it’s a big assumption) that the poll really is properly conducted and has taken a truly random sample of the entire population, it still cannot predict how people will vote, or predict anything else. It can only say something about how the poll would generalize to the entire population at the time the poll was taken.
So it can properly say something like “if we had asked the entire population at the same time we did the sample if they intended to vote for candidate X then most likely Y% (within n %, p% of the time) of the population would have named candidate Z at that time.
It cannot tell us what proportion of the people who said they intend to vote for candidate X actually do intend to do that or whether their intention will change at some time before the actual voting day. There may be other evidence to support a claim about that, but it isn’t in the poll itself.
Forgive me if I belabour the obvious.
Yes, I do think there’s a media obsession with winners and losers which masks the big picture. On Sunday, Sanders and Clinton each won 1 state. Sanders squeaked by in Michigan, while Clinton trounced Sanders in Mississippi. How the media reports that is less important than the actual result, which is that Sanders is not making up ground relative to Clinton.
From an academic perspective, the Republican primary is really interesting. Some Republicans are resorting to tactical voting – Rubio fans planning to vote for Kasich in Ohio so that Trump loses, and then Kasich fans returning the favor in Florida. In the general election, people need to balance many factors, including who they like the most, how likely their vote is to make a difference in the outcome, and if there are any candidates that are completely unacceptable to them. The nature of the electoral college system is that people in Texas or California have a presidential vote that is worth less than Ohio or Iowa, but at the same time have a greater ability to vote their conscience.
I’m torn on the primary system. I think a national primary would be good, as long as it’s later. None of this January stuff, have a primary for everyone in June. On the other hand, while people in Iowa and New Hampshire have greater influence in narrowing the field, it also means that all those Iowans or New Hampshirites that voted for Carson and Bush effectively threw their votes away.
I think PZ said he was going to do the former in the primary and then the latter in the general. I’m not sure how that’s inconsistent. If the political dynamics of primary and general elections were the same, then maybe you’d have a point, but they’re not.
Voting on the basis of which candidate wins the Democrat primary is quite clearly not using the same criterion as voting for the best polling non-Republican, don’t be disingenuous.
Here’s another take on the media circus:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=4041
@#30, brucegee1962
Yeah, I remember Nader. And what I remember is that the total number of votes for Nader in 2000 was smaller, by a factor of 20, than the number of Democrats who voted for Bush, according to exit polls at the time. And I remember that even though this was incontrovertible evidence that the Democrats had moved too far to the right, to the point where their own supporters couldn’t tell the difference between the two major parties. And I remember that this fact was quickly buried by the Democratic Party, because they desperately wanted to continue pushing right (a movement which, not to put too fine a point on it, was both led and exemplified by the Clintons). And I remember how Democratic tribalists — the sort who don’t really care about policy or democracy but will root for their team, no matter what — spent the next fifteen years blaming Nader instead of the Democrats for what was the Democrats’ own loss.
And I remember how Democratic loyalists pointed to the Iraq war and said “we’d never do that if we had won”. And I remember that Hillary Clinton not only voted for that war but was a major cheerleader for it — right up until it became a political liability, and then she couldn’t say enough against it. And I remember that when bombing of Libya started — in defiance of Congress; even Bush didn’t go that far — it was a fairly obvious parallel to Iraq, and yet the Democrats went ahead with it. And I remember that, once again, Clinton was a big cheerleader for it until it became a political liability. And I remember the revelation that Clinton had actually gone so far as to actively sabotage a diplomatic resolution, because she wanted war so much. All of which goes to show: the Democratic Party Establishment, and Clinton in Particular, do want war as much as the Republicans, enough to create obvious-before-the-fact disasters.
And I remember that the Democratic Party never says a word about people who don’t vote, but used their purely false example of Nader in 2000 to demonize people who vote 3rd-party. And I remember seeing poll after poll showing that the American public as a whole tend to support left-leaning policy, and I remember the Democrats ignoring that and moving further and further right. And I remember how Obama won in 2008 with the support of young people and then immediately abandoned all the issues they considered important in favor of passing Mitt Romney’s gift to the insurance industry. And I remember how young people didn’t turn out to vote after that, in 2010 and beyond, and I remember how the Democrats blamed the young people for that, as though the party hadn’t cynically abandoned them at the first opportunity.
Yeah, I remember Nader. People like you would be better off forgetting, though.
@8 Vivec
I know, it’s almost like they’re from the same city or something.
@41 futurechemist
So first of all, Sanders is making up ground relative to Clinton. Most of the Southern states are done with primaries and that’s where Clinton had major leads. The fact is that Sanders was predicted to lose Michigan by a lot, and instead won it. It’s only going to get worse for Clinton from here, as the states become much, much better for Sanders.
If you’re talking about big picture, then Michigan, if anything, demonstrated Sanders has a surprisingly reasonable chance of winning.
“Surprisingly Reasonable” What a weasel word.
Sanders has to win 60% of the remaining delegates, which, since Democratic primaries are not winner-take-all, will be practically impossible.
Actually, I don’t think I should pay for any political primary. Let the parties handle it themselves.
@48 keithb
??? Where are you getting that number from? He’s only down by ~200 delegates (so he needs like 53% of the remaining delegates). Are you including the superdelegates? Because those haven’t mattered in previous elections as they move to the frontrunner when they vote at the end.
I feel like this is talking about horse-race which is exactly what PZ is railing against.
would it take for both parties to split? It does seem likely as of now that there is a fair chance that the republican party may split. What is the possibility that the awakening left wing split off if the “centrist” prevail in the democratic party?
uncle frogy
@#49, doublereed:
Indeed; if any candidate were to win the elected delegates and lose via superdelegates, it would destroy the party, which means the superdelegates will never determine the outcome of an election (unless it it so evenly split that the superdelegates serve as a tiebreaker, which nobody is currently suggesting will happen). This being the case, superdelegates are useless — there are many ways to have a tiebreaker without this sort of charade. Superdelegates serve only one purpose: to permit the Democratic Party Machine to give a psychological edge to the candidate of their choice by pretending that the superdelegates are meaningful.
@#50, unclefrogy:
I don’t think a split is actually likely. To those of us in the Democratic Party, the idea of Trump or Cruz is a horror, but to the majority of the Republican rank and file, Trump and Cruz are merely a pair of names who are somewhere on a list of preferences. Maybe they think Trump isn’t as good as Cruz, or that both are inferior to Rubio, but they aren’t upset to find that one of them is winning the way Democrats are.
But in the event of a split, what is likely to happen is that the Democratic Party will absorb the financial wing of the Republican Party. This will absolutely cement the party’s rightward movement on financial/environmental/labor issues, not that there was any doubt that conservative fiscal policy from Democrats is “the new normal” thanks to the efforts of the DLC. They’ll continue to be token leftists on purely social issues (but only when those issues do not impact the budget very much) and also to be neoliberals on the foreign policy front — in other words, Hillary Clinton will merely be the harbinger.
The religious nutjobs will retain the “Republican” name. They will remain politically powerful in some states, because they have the votes, but with the financial plug pulled, they’ll gradually lose power. There are sincere religious nutjobs, but there are far more hucksters, and once the financial backing is no longer so easy there will be fewer candidates willing to do the job. (Running for office, even on a local level, is horribly draining and degrading.)
The real question is whether the Democratic Party will split. It would be nice to think that most Democrats would rather jump ship than accept the Kochs, but if they’re willing to swallow Hillary “We Came We Saw He Died Ha Ha” Clinton and Rahm “Who Else Are They Going To Vote For” Emmanuel, I don’t have a lot of optimism that the average Democrat actually has any moral qualms about military interventions or right-wing financial policy; they’re mentally invested in the Democratic Brand without having much of a clue as to what that brand might mean.
Exactly!
OK, so technically I did vote Democratic in 2010. And I did vote Democratic in the 2012 Congressional election. And I voted for Stein for President rather than throwing my vote away. But I sure as hell didn’t vote for Obama, and I sure as hell won’t vote for Clinton and I’m sick and tired of Democratic brand loyalists telling me to vote “strategically” for people who oppose 99.9% of my principles just because the polls say they’re the best shot at beating someone who opposes 100% of them.
Frankly, given my position, there is no difference between Trump and Clinton that directly affects me personally— except that if I can survive 4 years of Trump, there’s hope that someone decent will beat him in 2020 (or even that a left-wing backlash may remove him after 2018).
I miss Pharyngulating polls.
I remember Nader. I remember Jesse Ventura. I also remember John Anderson. Those three data points are enough to not spend any energy this election cycle on non-viable independent candidates, or waste your vote
vote your conscienceto spite the Democratic party.It would be great to have viable independent candidates, but the effective actions necessary to work on that issue aren’t all that relevant to this election.
Since Stein was non-viable (electable), you threw your vote away. QED.
@#54/55 Tethys/Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls
Yeah, we have to make sure Clinton gets into the White House, or else we might have more wars!
…oh, wait, Clinton wants more wars. Her official campaign website says she will “confront” China, and she says the same in public about Russia (over Syria) and Iran.
Well, then, we have to have Clinton, or else we might have another financial system crash!
…except that Clinton doesn’t want to do anything about that, either. She says the banks aren’t big enough to require further government intervention.
Okay, well, we need to keep abortion from being made illegal!
…except that the Democrats can block that without the presidency, and if — as you claim — they aren’t utterly worthless, they will do so. (And even if Clinton gets in, she has said she won’t push for any big changes against Republican intransigence, and they will certainly object to reversing the things they have already done.)
Well, then, trump card (no pun intended): we need to keep the Republicans out of the Supreme Court!
…except that Obama is now pushing for that, too, and Clinton says she’ll be like a third Obama term.
Face it: the Democrats as represented by Clinton and Obama no longer have anything to offer us. They’ve sold their base out so completely that I’m surprised they haven’t found a way to charge us for typing the party name in Internet discussions. You tribal loyalists get served big bowls of steaming feces every four years by the party establishment, and your response is to clean your plates and say “thank you, sir, may I have another?”
The last time the Democrats lost a close national election, did they swing noticeably to the left?
The last time we had a Democrat in office for two terms, did we get a greater variety of candidates on the left side of things?
Its always hard for me to remember that the us doesn’t have preferential voting. Here in Oz if I had an election between say Hillary bernie and trump I could vote 1 Bernie and 2 Hillary and be likely to see one of them get in.
@56 Vicar
Obama has not chosen who he is going to appoint to the supreme court and even your example is in favor of abortion rights. Some of the other choices that he has looked at have been liberal. Before Scalia died, the court was 5-4 on Roe v Wade. People have this fantasy that Roe v Wade is settled law and that it can’t be overturned, but in fact it is already quite close to being overturned. It is not unrealistic that that could happen if a Republican became president.
Also, Citizen’s United is currently at 4-4. So a Democratic president could overturn Citizen’s United, a Republican president would not.
Also, when you look at things the president does control, like policy for DOJ and federal law enforcement, you do have many differences between republicans and democrats. For instance I would expect a republican president to hamper the civil rights division and such like that.
vicar
Nothing about viable independent candidates? Is it really too much to ask that you address the topic of my comment rather than erecting strawhillary’s? My state has endorsed Bernie and handed Trump his ass. I can’t do more than that, no matter how hard I wish for responsible governance.
Years ago Jon Steward lampooned polls-driven coverage by showing parts of a news story (on CNN?) where they were going over a poll in which people expressed their beliefs on whether certain provisions were in the Affordable Care Act.
“So…”, Steward asked (paraphrasing), “are those provisions in there or not? Why don’t you tell us? That is your job as reporters, right?”
Since Gore was non-viable (electable), you threw your vote away.
Since Kerry was non-viable (electable), you threw your vote away.
Or alternatively…
So you’re saying I should have voted for Romney?
Is Stein comparable to Gore, Kerry, or Romney, or are you comparing apples and oranges? In order to win the Presidency, you have to win the nomination. This is a simple fact. Stein has no chance of winning either the nomination or the election. If you want change, don’t care for Hillary, all you had to do was nominate Bernie.
Hoping that Trump doesn’t destroy the country, because you hate Hillary Clinton enough to not care about the rest of the country is cutting off your nose to spite your face, and then shooting yourself in the foot for good measure.
Hey remember how the economy was pillaged and multiple wars were declared and not declared last time we had an R president? But sure, lets just hope Trump isn’t worse, even though he is already worse than the worst President ever.
Liar. Gore and Kerry were electable,
Gore won the popular vote, and Kerry was close.
Stein couldn’t even beat the liberturds, less than 0.4% popular vote.
Show me, with solid polling evidence, where Stein is viable. Viable doesn’t mean they got elected, it means they could be elected (say >45%). Stein is nothing but a footnote in the general election…..
If you won’t show viability, you have nothing cogent to say. Period.
That was mostly snark. I was planning to segue into yet another point about the inherently circular nature of declaring that America shouldn’t support Stein because America won’t support Stein, or point out that because the odds of a Gore, Kerry, or Romney victory stand at exactly 0% they are the definition of nonviable, or point out that while Gore’s 5-4 loss was close, it does give us the opportunity to examine all the voters who were actually counted and determine that none of them were likely to have voted any other way making him inherently nonviable regardless of how “close” he was.
But in the end, I decided to go a slightly different route with the second post which you seem to have ignored.
If you think I “threw away” my vote by giving it to Stein, would you have preferred I vote for Romney?
Stein did win the nomination in 2012 and may well in 2016.
Except at the start of the primary, polls said Sanders was “non-viable” and had no better chance in 2016 than Stein did in 2012. Presumably, that means voting for Sanders is “throwing away” your vote.
Or alternatively, maybe “viability” is sort of a moving target— a candidate who polls very low at the start of the primary (or even right beforehand) can end up winning it. After all, Sanders did seem to do pretty well in the Michigan primary for a completely non-viable candidate.
Mind you, I do still very much intend to vote for Sanders in the primary, and I will vote for Sanders in the general election if that’s an option. However, I will not vote for Clinton under any circumstances.
From my perspective, there is absolutely no difference between Trump and Clinton that affects me in any way— they would both be perfectly happy to see me dead. If Trump and Clinton win their respective primaries, I’m equally screwed no matter which one wins. If anything, Trump would be a marginal improvement because (a) his actions would reflect badly on the right with less opportunity to blame them on the left, (b) the President’s party generally loses seats in the midterm, (c) Democrats in Congress would be less likely to endorse a bad idea if it came from a Republican President rather than a Democratic one, and (d) we’re more likely to elect a liberal Democrat after four years of disaster under Trump than four years of disaster under Clinton.
If you would honestly prefer Clinton over Trump, then that’s great. I’m not sure why, but I’m sure you have your reasons. Just please do recognize how presumptuous it is for you to indignantly tell me that I am morally bound to vote against my own interests for the benefit of your interests.
You mean Obama? Yes, I remember that— he’s kind of still in office and we’re kind of still fighting his wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria while he coddles bankers and Wall Street pillagers. Or is that OK if you’re a Democrat?
Meanwhile, Clinton expressly advocates more of the same— she endorsed all of Bush’s wars and all of Obama’s wars, and she’s bought and paid for by the corporate pillagers.
…you comment on a post all about the uselessness of polls.
Frankly, all this nonsense about “viability” is completely irrelevant anyway. If you think I “threw away” my vote in 2012 by giving it to Stein, then who do you think I should have voted for?
If you are going to make such asinine claims as Obama started the various wars, and claim that the viability of a candidate is somehow irrelevant to their ability to become President, I really don’t see any value in further discussion.
He started the war in Syria and the (third) war in Iraq.
He may not have started the wars in Afghanistan or Pakistan, but that’s a meaningless technicality— he endorses them. He has continued them since he took office, he plans to continue them as long as he remains in office, and he has explicitly stated his support for them.
That’s a straw man and you know it.
My point is (a) I’d rather vote for a losing candidate I support than a winning candidate I oppose, and (b) whether a candidate is “viable” is a constantly moving target that can’t be pinned down in advance. Of course, actually addressing those points is a lot harder than just shredding a straw man.
I believe, on this point, you are (accidentally) correct. If you’re going to make the asinine claim that Obama shouldn’t be held responsible for his actions, or that I should vote based on a candidate’s position in the polls rather than their position on the issues, then there is no value in further discussion.
New Yorkers have bought the Brooklyn Bridge from Trump a number of times. Consider the number of Trump Dumps in NYC. Don’t count on them to save you from The Donald.
I doubt I’ll live to see the day when New York is a swing state.
The polls are only useful for political pundits, and then only so they will have something to talk about. How is it we’ve managed to become focused on the horse race and lose sight of the real issues at hand ? Personally, I think it’s because it’s easier to read polls and election returns, all of which are handed to you on a plate, than it is to go out and find people who are knowledgeable about the issues and sit down with them and discuss matters.
People who use the polls to decide who to vote for in the “I don’t want to lose” sense mystify me. As though being on the “losing side” would hurt them somehow. Further, in the primaries at least, worrying about which candidate can win or lose nationally isn’t something individual voters need to be concerned with, just the party. Individual voters should focus on candidates that actually support their political views. Never mind that the whole primary system is broken (or that people in general are broken, er, never mind that last comment), the main priority in them at least should still be getting the candidate you actually want to win them.
I do think PZ might be going a little overboard here though. There’s literally no way to outlaw frickin’ polling data. It’s just never going to happen… ever…. I mean ever. What are you going to do, make it illegal to ask people who they’re voting for? Make it illegal to apply statistical analysis to that data? Make it illegal to publish that data? I can’t see ANY of those things as a possibility, so polling is something we’ve got to live with. News reporting ON that polling data though, THAT should certainly change. I’m 100% with you that news stations spending so much focus on who’s “ahead” is pointless when they aren’t bothering to report the candidate’s actual views. I’d extend that to every time the media reports on “gaffs” or what someone was wearing or random pointless noise like that. Heck, these days the news cycle is so ridiculously fast that “gaffs” don’t even affect the outcome like they used to. Someone can make a random racist comment and it’ll be forgotten overnight, if anyone ever saw it to begin with, because it came and went from the news cycle so fast that the odds that a majority of the public even SAW that news report are pretty slim. The news is ridiculous, and one of the very few to focus on the actual issues just shuttered their doors recently (American Al-Jazeera), because everyone everywhere is terrible all the time (I don’t really believe that… most of the time).
I gotta say randomly targetting fivethirtyeight as part of the problem doesn’t make sense to me. They’re doing good statistical analysis, near as I can tell, and heck I learned about how good statistical analysis works from Nate Silver’s book. It really changed how I analyze risk, and I really don’t get the hate for that particular site. I’ve seen some great articles there like http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/statisticians-found-one-thing-they-can-agree-on-its-time-to-stop-misusing-p-values/ and http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/flint-has-a-chance-to-improve-more-than-its-water/ and http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/methane-is-leaking-all-over-the-place/ . The site is known for it’s candidate analysis, but it’s got a lot more to say and using maths looks like a good way to do it, to me at least. If I’m missing something (very likely) that shows that their analysis is flawed then I want to know it.
Now we get to the crux of it all, should presidential candidates themselves, after all the primaries are said and done, be voted on strategically? I think this really comes down to how pragmatic vs idealistic you are. I’ll tell you right now my attitude varies rather dramatically between the two extremes. Ask me one month and I’ll tell you that reality is a cold and uncaring thing and injustice is inescapable in this world until we die. The ideals of voting are something the universe doesn’t care about, and don’t really exist, so let’s just accept fate and go with the least harmful candidate that actually has a chance of winning. Another month and I’ll say that last month’s me is a shortsighted fool that doesn’t understand that this attitude perpetuates the problem, and even if there is a significant risk of “spoiling” a race by voting for an unlikely candidate, it’s worth taking that risk just to send a message that there’s people out there that want more, that everything CAN be different if only everyONE was different, that there’s no immutable laws of reality that dictate how people will behave, and it’s worth having a little faith to get those ideals realized, because actually taking chances is the only way things ever HAVE changed, and change HAS happened historically. It’s that same duality everyone deals with. With that in mind, I honestly can’t be mad at someone who goes the pragmatic route. They’re still doing what they think is the right thing to prevent the worst possible outcome, even if it involves settling for the lesser of two evils. The idealists are needed too though, to remind us that the lesser of two evils is still evil, and it isn’t enough.
I know it sounds wishy washy, but that’s because I’m not really settled on the matter myself. My moods stitch between idealistic and pragmatic rather often, so check back in a few weeks and maybe I’ll disagree with everything I said here.
We get that YOU are a selfish ideological purist. We got that a month ago. You are repeating yourself, as if we care. We don’t, as most of us use other means to decide how we vote, which includes what may be better the country/state/county/city in the short term. Rethug rule is never better these days.
To be honest, a conservative calling me a “selfish ideological purist” for being liberal isn’t as much an insult as you might have hoped.
For someone who doesn’t care, you do seem quick to fly into a frothing rage at the idea that I might potentially vote based on my interests rather than your brand loyalty.
As I asked before— if you think I shouldn’t have voted for Stein in 2012, who do you think I should have voted for?
I vote according to my principles. Always.
It so happens that “unqualified candidates promoting destructive policies should not be allowed anywhere near the reins of power” is one of the most important principles that I believe in.
Same here. Apparently, that’s considered “selfish ideological purity” now.
It must be terribly hard to be the only super genius who can see the true differences between the candidates.
I mean the super genius who can’t.
Hard, anyway.
Yes, anybody to your right is a conservative. I am a progressive, and vote predominantly democratic. I dealt with real Marxist assholes back in the radicalization of campus during the ‘Nam war. You, like them, are so far out in left field (baseball metaphor), that you can’t see the batter (the political center), as you are on the other side of the fence.
I vote for the candidate nearest to my beliefs (nobody has ever matched totally in 40+ years of voting) who is viable, meaning electable. Not somebody who can’t even get half a percent in the national election….
Keep in mind anybody to the left of a libertarian is a communist. Those at the edges on both sides have a hard time seeing where the middle is.
A progressive who supports imperialistic wars, austerity, coddling of Wall Street criminals, mass spying, persecution of whistleblowers, and torture but opposes health care reform, expansion of the social safety net, and debt-free college?
Look, if you’re trying to convince anyone that you’re not a conservative, declaring that anyone who supports health care reform and opposes Obama’s wars is a “Marxist” is probably not helping your case.
So if polls predict a landslide victory for Trump, you would vote for Trump? After all, he’d be the only “viable, meaning electable” candidate so you’d presumably have to vote for him by default.
Who do you plan to vote for in the Democratic primary? If your first criterion is “viability,” you’ll have to vote for Clinton— in Michigan (and other states), polls confirmed that Sanders was not “viable, meaning electable” right up until he was elected.
Meanwhile, what if you were offered the choice between two high-polling candidates you hated equally and a third low-polling candidate who you supported? What then?
Because, see, I also vote for the candidate who (a) most closely matches my beliefs and (b) has a decent shot at winning. The problem is that when the two mostly likely prospects both oppose by beliefs equally, it’s impossible to manage both (a) and (b) leaving me to choose between voting for a candidate I 100% oppose or a candidate who is unlikely to win. In my case, I vote for the unlikely candidate I support— a negligible chance of a good candidate winning is better than the certainty of a bad candidate winning.
Don’t tell me you’re another person who asserts that there are many massive differences between Obama and Romney but can’t actually name one.
…Romney’s running? His website doesn’t seem to say he is.
Sorry, I was talking about actual candidates. I assume anyone who thinks there are differences between Clinton and Trump or Clinton and Cruz are blinkered idiots?
Or maybe we’re still talking about elections other than this one…?
It does seem odd, though.
Either a Green party candidate would be able to swing enough Democrat votes (and we’re talking Democrats here, because however much some people claim to not be able to differentiate between the candidates, Republicans don’t appear to have that same issue, strangely) to toss the election to the Republicans, or not.
If not, I’m not really sure why people think the Democrats would listen to them, as they’re clearly not actually being very effective leaders.
If so, I’m not really sure why the Democrats would see a win by the right as a reason to swing back left. Sanders didn’t run after 8 years of Bush – he ran after 8 years of Obama. That might not be some weird accident of history, possibly it shows Sanders knows what he’s doing.
Anyone who believes that a Green party candidate actually might win the general is more than welcome to shake hands with me to the tune of a $10,000 bet over that. I would like to pay off my bike and cover some medical co-pays all in one fell swoop, and you know as well as I that would be dead cert sure money.
He ran in 2012. In that election, I voted for Stein. A large chunk of this debate has been about the fact that I voted for Stein in 2012, NoR’s insistence that I should have done something else (exactly what unspecified) and our disagreement on the subject.
If you think Romney and Obama and Stein were never candidates on the ballot in a presidential election, that could explain a lot of what I’ve been reading in this thread.
Why would you assume that?
We’ve been talking at length about 2012. In 2012, Trump didn’t run and Clinton was not viable, that is electable.
Exactly what do you find odd?
Most Republicans vote based on brand loyalty— Democrats are evil and illegitimate by definition. It’s been our one saving grace thus far; Obama agrees with Congressional Republicans on pretty much everything, but the minute he concedes a point to them, they reflexively oppose their own position lest they commit the ultimate sin of agreeing with a Democrat.
That authoritarian conservatives tend to unite in unquestioning support of strong leaders while progressive liberals expect their leaders to actually represent them is just how things work. No one is surprised when conservatives support Republican candidates unquestioningly while liberals withhold support from Democratic candidates they don’t like.
After 8 years of Bush, Obama ran a campaign of liberal promises. In fact, Obama trounced Clinton in the primary because he promised liberal government while Clinton offered warmed-over Reaganism.
Yes, Sanders knows what he’s doing— running as the liberal alternative when there already is a liberal alternative (or so it appears) is a lot of effort for little gain; mounting a primary challenge against an incumbent president is a fool’s errand.
Sure— with a few caveats.
(1) The bet is only good for an election where the Green candidate has an actual campaign on par with Sanders— no need for any big donors, but some actual effort is required. Otherwise, you might as well bet that I can run faster than an Olympic sprinter who hasn’t been told there’s a race and isn’t bothering to run.
(2) The bet is only good for an election where people vote for candidates they support. If a majority of Americans went to the polls and said: “I prefer the Greens, but I’ll strategically vote for the Democrats,” you could easily point to the Greens’ poor showing and declare them non-viable; strategic voting based on polls and past results can easily create an Abilene problem where everyone agrees to something nobody wants because everyone “compromises” their beliefs to an imaginary consensus.
(3) The bet is only good for an election where the Democratic and Republican candidates are more or less equally bad. This one comes to the heart of the matter— you seem to assume everyone votes based on brand loyalty, such that a Democrat will always vote for Democrats, etc. Because I voted Green once, you assume I’m a Green Party Member who always votes Green. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth; being a liberal, I will vote for the most liberal candidate who has a realistic shot at winning. In the event that there are no candidates who are even remotely liberal who have any shot at winning, I will abandon the “reasonable chance at winning” before I abandon the “liberal” and vote for the long shot rather than the candidate I oppose.
The upshot being that over the course of many Presidential, Congressional, and state-level elections, I have voted Green exactly twice— once for Stein in 2012, and once for a governor in a race with only one viable, that is electable, candidate. Every other vote I cast has been for a Democrat. Yet apparently, that’s not enough— you demand absolute loyalty to the Democratic Party in all respects. Ironic, then, that you accuse me of demanding ideological purity.
Jake Harban @ 83:
My honest apologies, I was talking about things upcoming rather than past, as we can alter the one but not the other. I didn’t make that clear.
Um, the next paragraph.
What’s stopping them? I’m asking seriously.
What leads you to believe that most Democrats actually prefer Green?
If they don’t, your caveat kinda falls apart, doesn’t it?
If they do, what’s stopping them from expressing that opinion at a rate greater than about 3%? I don’t mean in polls, I mean at the ballot box.
And if your concept is that Democrats would vote Green if they only knew what they were doing… do you consider it a mark of good leadership to be unable to get people to support you even when they agree with you? If you can’t do that, how the hell can you hope to accomplish anything when people don’t start out agreeing with you?
Would that make for an effective executive?
I’ve been told repeatedly in this thread and others like it that that condition has been met. Do you think it has?
I don’t assume, and have never said (to my knowledge – I might be forgetting having done so – if so, please quote me and I’ll apologize) that.
I do, however, assume that a large amount of actual governing occurs primarily along party lines – that a Democratic executive is far more likely to work for policies supported by Democratic Senators and Reps, and vice-versa. That makes the party affiliation of whoever is in the White House pretty damn important, as far as I can tell.
The difference between Romney and Obama is that Romney would have had a Republican VP, been beholden to the Republican base, and been expected to work with the Republican side of the aisle. That difference hasn’t gotten any less significant in this election.
Also, you yourself are assuming that people – at least some people – vote more-or-less strictly along party lines. Is this assumption only good when you’re making it? Or is it bad all the time?
I have made this mistake in another thread, possibly on another blog, and I don’t believe it was with you, but it may have been. Frankly, I’m too lazy to go check up to see where I screwed up earlier on.
I apologized and corrected the error at the time, and since then, have been quite careful about not making it again.
If you can point out where I have said anything like that in this thread, I’ll clarify or apologize.
If you can’t, please don’t tell me I have done so. Thanks.
And here’s where you and I differ.
I prefer chemo to cancer. Chemo is poison, can kill you, and might not get rid of the cancer anyway.
Spontaneous remission of cancer can and does occur, but sitting around hoping it will happen is not terribly realistic.
Here’s the thing, though.
There’s just one case of cancer, and we’ve all got it. It’s not just your cancer, is the guy next to you too.
Now, if you’re willing to say “Well, doing what I’m doing is going to make a Republican victory more likely – however minutely – but it’s worth giving the guy next to me a Republican President to let me vote the way I want”, well, ok, that’s your call. But that does tend to sound selfish.