Posted on 09/21/2004 9:53:19 AM PDT by Scenic Sounds
No polls and no talk shows? Is that it, or would you also ban newspaper editorials, campaign events, television shows, and e-mail?
How about relying on a free people to make up their minds without a totalitarian restriction on free speech in the thirty days before an election?
It is a provocative position, isn't it?
But, you know, if it helped him gain some attention, maybe it helped bring to the attention of voters the real meat of his message (contained in another paragraph of this article):
What do you think about this issue, Jim? :-)
Molon labe.
Bingo!
Because that would allow us to weight the poll, thus giving it some value.
As it is, polls are valueless, yet influential. Lots of sheep are influenced by seeing that "most people think ______." If that were coupled with the fact that most people who think ____ are idiots (or well-informed), the poll would have some value.
For instance, ___% "favor abortion." Wouldn't it be of value to know how many of those who favor abortion think that there are ANY restrictions on it? (I would bet that many, or most, do.) Or how many know that a child has a beating heart at 21 days, or brain waves by 40?
Simple opinion-sampling plays to the idiotic notion that opinions are self-validating — that is, that simply because a person has an opinion, his opinion is worth something. And so the dutiful reporting of those opinions influence those who reason wrongly that the majority can't be wrong.
Weighted polling would have some value. What we have now has influence, but no value.
Dan
For a man who loves the Constitution, Alan sure needs to work on his relationship with the 1st Amendment...
"Good point! I think you could be right. A lot of the talk in an election year is about polls and not issues. And, I think a case could be made that publishing polls in the press might even affect the views of some voters."
So could publishing interviews done with candidates.
And interviews done with other citizens.
And publishing economic news!
And just about any other kind of news!
Maybe we should ban it all during election season. That's the ticket! Mccain / feingold didn't go far enough! We must ban any kinds of political speech that might affect the outcome of an election!
Hey, didn't free republic possibly effect the outcome of the presidential election by blowing the lid off rathergate?? Maybe we should voluntarily shut down the site until the election is over to keep from influencing the election! Or do we only shut down the things that negatively effect the candidates we are rooting for???
I can't believe you are serious. That's just sad.
He could run down the street naked and gain attention to his positions as well.
I prefer the way he drew attention early in the 2000 primary, myself. Reasoned, principled, yet quick of wit.
Polls are NOT valueless. They aren't as valuable as the media wants them to be, but they have a clear value. Well run polls, polls that have a party spread similar to the region being polled, polls that ask likely voters instead of registered voters, polls that run over multiple days and hit over 1000 people, give us a window into how a campaign is going and what issues are carrying weight with the public.
Actually what you're proposing reminds me a lot of the highly biased and completely bogus polls I saw prior to Desert Shield. In those polls they were trying to tie support for the upcoming war in Kuwait to lack of education; the primary poll was of whether or not people thought Kuwait would turn into the next Viet Nam then they broke the data down by level of education which "showed" that people that had finished college were more likely to see Kuwait as Viet Nam II than those who had only done some college who in turn were more likely to see things that way than people who had done no college. The clear message they were trying to send was that better educated (and presumably better informed) people were against the war and thought we would get bogged down in Kuwait for over a decade of constant warfare.
Good polls show you the actual questions asked, and break down people's answers into levels of support. Whether or not a person knows the reality of abortion is 100% unimportant to whether or not they'll vote for people that share their position. Our form of government doesn't devalue the uninformed, and any type of polling that did would then not be reflective of how the populace thinks and votes, which is the point of polls: predicting votes.
No simple opinion sampling plays to the reality of the situation. As a representative democracy all opinions held by people that are actually going to vote ARE worth something, they're worth exactly one vote.
Weighted polls would have no value as predictors of election outcomes, and would have no value in telling us what the people on the street actually think. About the only thing they'd be good for is to tell us how good a job of disemination of information the media is doing, and we already know the answer to that question.
That's a thought, but I really think that doing that would create some tension with some of his other positions. It might work better for a different kind of candidate.
Why should the mainstream media bother to report the well-known facts that the sun rises in the east, that Alan Keyes needs to get back on his meds, that the Pope is Catholic, etc?
This is crazy. I'm frankly surprised that he would make such an anti-constitutional statement.
I think there may be a "method to his madness." See post 42. Maybe some voters will read and become acquainted with his real message because of this unusual proposal.
The pathetic drubbing Keyes will recieve will signal the GOP to avoid those issues like the plague.
Could be, but remember that that is exactly what people told Goldwater about running on conservative principles in 1964!
And look what happened after that! ;-)
You haven't persuaded me to change my mind, nor even that you really understand what I'm saying. So, we disagree. I can live with that.
Dan
I understand what you're saying very well. You want polls to not only show the opinion people have but WHY they have them. That might be valuable information on some deep societal level, but within the context of an election (which is what polls are all about) it isn't useful, because WHY doesn't have a column on the ballot.
We could ban editorials too while we're at it!
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