If the polling is this wacky, why bother publishing it at all?

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.

  • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
    389·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
      31·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
        31·
        1 year ago

        Yep, I think you’re 100 percent right. Counting wasn’t my choice in the primary - I wanted someone more progressive and felt she had some other flaws - but I sure as hell voted for her in the general.

        It’s theoretically possible for a third party or independent candidate to win, but it’s so colossally unlikely, we’ve never really come that close. From the Wikipedia article:

        Only once has one of the two major parties finished third in a presidential election, when not the result of a realignment: in 1912, the Progressive Party, with former president Theodore Roosevelt as their presidential candidate obtained 88 electoral votes and surpassed the Republicans.[1] In fact, Roosevelt ran one of the most successful third-party candidacies in history but was defeated by the Democrat (Woodrow Wilson) and the Progressive party quickly disappeared while the Republicans re-gained their major party status. The last third-party candidate to win states was George Wallace of the American Independent Party in 1968, while the most recent third-party candidate to win more than 5.0% of the vote was Ross Perot, who ran as an independent and as the standard-bearer of the Reform Party in 1992 and 1996, respectively.

        It’s really a two party system, so the effort needs to be on getting the right candidate to win the primary. So many people stayed home rather than vote for Clinton that we ended up with Trump.

          • frezik@midwest.social
            102·
            1 year ago

            We also didn’t have the whole government apparatus burnt down by a mental three year old. I know it’s not a great choice, but it is a clear one.

                  • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
                    31·
                    1 year ago

                    My brother wake up. So many lemmings live in fantasy worlds where they believe that everyone can wake up tomorrow well informed and prepared to do the right thing. That’s not reality. We can talk all day about what’s the best moral candidate, but it doesn’t fucking matter because at the end of the day, people are going to vote between one of two names they’ve heard before. 99.99% of Americans will never see your reasonings and explanations for why any given person is the best candidate, it doesn’t matter how perfect your arguments are or how much evidence you have to back your claims, because you aren’t friends with Rupert Murdoch, Mark Thompson, Brian Roberts, or any of the other handful of guys who completely control media information in this country.

                  • Sparlock@lemmy.worldEnglish
                    2·
                    1 year ago

                    Go ahead and vote for your third party candidate that passes all your purity tests.

                    President Trump is the only realistic outcome of voting 3rd party no matter what pipe dream you might want to be real. Just don’t act like its not your fault when Trump is President again and you find yourself living under a dictator.