It is pretty much certain that polls are completely useless because they are so frequently wrong.
All polls in the last election were consistently within several tenths of one percent. Yet, …
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It is pretty much certain that polls are completely useless because they are so frequently wrong.
All polls in the last election were consistently within several tenths of one percent. Yet, Trump won the election by a huge margin. [Ed. note: He finished with the seventh-highest margin for the party not in power since 1932 as of November 21, according to PBS, and it was bigger than Biden’s share in 2020.]
It used to be worse. The exit poll data from the eastern states sometimes made the voting in the western states less important.
Why are the polls so wrong? There is a large pool of conservative voters as shown by the past results, who do not respond to pollsters but who do vote. I am such a voter.
In many instances, several percentage points can be added to polls in favor of a Republican candidate regardless of the actual poll results. The pollsters don’t estimate this margin themselves using methods of mathematical statistics.
On the Electoral College: There are those who debate at length the Electoral College versus the majority of the popular vote; it happened several times in our history that the elected president and the Electoral College winner did not get the majority of the popular vote. Notably, this happened in 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016.
In the 1824 elections, the House of Representatives winner lost the popular vote.
There are also those who campaign for abolishing the Electoral College in favor of the popular vote. That shows a severe misunderstanding of the reasons for having the Electoral College.
The Founding Fathers, writing in the “Federalist Papers,” were leery of the direct democracy with the popular vote as the “tyranny of the majority.”
For this reason, we have enshrined in our Constitution the representative democracy. Thus, we vote for our representatives in the two houses of the U.S. Congress, who then make the decisions for us.
The point is that even the smallest state of the Union has the same number of senators and therefore the same number of votes in the Senate as the largest state.
The Founding Fathers established the Electoral College in the Constitution, in part, as a compromise between the election of the President by a vote in Congress and the election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens.
The term Electoral College is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution. The Founding Fathers talk only about “electors.” Similarly, the word “democracy” is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. From this some pundits, who will remain nameless, erroneously conclude that “we do not have democracy in the United States because we have a constitutional republic.”
Democracy is not mutually exclusive with a constitutional republic. Similarly, democracy is not mutually exclusive with the constitutional monarchy in the United Kingdom, where democracy goes back to the Magna Carta of 1215.
Ivan Orisek
Forestburgh, NY
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