Polls Are Pretty Useless

 

TV news lives on polls, but I don’t think they are accurate.  They show to some extent what some people are thinking, but they don’t necessarily predict the outcome of elections unless there is a substantial spread between the responses.  I would not even trust a 10% differential. 

I think there are many people, like myself, who do not reaspond to poll questions, so the people polled are not representative, and many do not respond honestly.  Those who do respond may strongly favor a candidte and thus tend to respond in wsys they think will help their candidate, e.g. by saying what issues they think are important. 

One big problem is that most pollsters are elite Democrats from left-leaning media or academia.  Conservatives sense this and when these leftist pollsters call, Republicans are not going to cooperate with them, because they see them as the enemy. The pollsters have contempt for the conservatives they interview and the interviewees know that.   Thus, polls tend to confirm whatever the political elite thinks is a likely result.  Pollsters are unable to talk to those who don’t share their opinions. 

Politico has an article by Steven Shepard about the difficulties with polls.  It says:

Pollsters know they have a problem. But they aren’t sure they’ve fixed it in time for the November election.

Since Donald Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory, pre-election polls have consistently understated support for Republican candidates, compared to the votes ultimately cast.

Once again, polls over the past two months are showing Democrats running stronger than once expected in a number of critical midterm races. It’s left some wondering whether the rosy results are setting the stage for another potential polling failure that dashes Democratic hopes of retaining control of Congress— and vindicates the GOP’s assertion that the polls are unfairly biased against them.

“There’s no question that the polling errors in [20]16 and [20]20 worry the polling profession, worry me as a pollster,” said Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll in Milwaukee and a longtime survey-taker in the battleground state of Wisconsin. “The troubling part is how much of that is unique to when Donald Trump is on the ballot, versus midterms when he is not on the ballot.”

After 2016, pollsters said the problem was their samples included too few voters without college degrees. The polls were better for the 2018 midterms, though they were still too Democratic on balance.

Then came 2020 — which was worse than 2016, and for which pollsters have yet to settle on a definitive explanation of what precisely went wrong. As a result, an easy fix has proven elusive. But pollsters have mostly agreed that, particularly in 2020, the surveys missed a chunk of Trump’s voters who refused to participate in polls.

And the New York Times noted that some of Democrats’ strongest numbers are coming in the states that have seen the greatest polling misses over the past few elections.

Partisan campaign pollsters in both parties suggested Trump voters are again difficult to capture in the run-up to this election.

“There is a good chance that a lot of the publicly released surveys are overstating Democratic strength,” said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster at the firm Public Opinion Strategies.

But some Democrats are daring not just to believe in the polls — but hoping that the party may actually overperform in November, pointing to two special congressional election wins last month in Alaska and New York, where polls showed Republicans ahead going into Election Day.

“You just saw the polls underestimate the victories in both Alaska and in Upstate New York,” Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an interview at a POLITICO Pro Premium Roundtable event earlier this month. “So, if anything, the polls may be showing a conservative bias right now.”

 

Stop Discriminating Against White Southerners

 

I resent the fact that Democrats revile Southerners who have positive feelings for the Confederacy.  Our ancestors fought for the Confederacy. It is normal to have positive feelings about your forebears, especially when they did brave things.  My great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy at Shiloh and at Mobile Bay.  I will not condemn him for that.  For me the Confederate battle flag is a symbol of respect for Southern bravery and devotion. 

The Confederate army did not fight against blacks.  They fought against other whites.  Slavery was an issue, but it was not part of the war; it was part of the politics.  White Confederates did not kill blacks unless they were on the battlefield as troops of the Yankee army.  Lincoln made a point of creating black military units, because there were none when the Civil War started. 

By and large the white veterans of the Confederate and Union armies reconciled after the war.  Blacks took no great interest in the Civil War battles that had been fought.  In the 1800s they did not see the war fought by Southerners as directed against them.  Of course, they wanted an end to slavery, but that came as a political decision, not from a military one. 

The fact that some bad people have appropriated the battle flag as their symbol does not mean that it is evil.  It is the people who are evil, not the flag.  For example, the swastika is viewed as an evil symbol in European culture because of its association with the Nazis, but is viewed positively in many Asian cultures, particularly in India.  If the swastika can be a positive religious symbol in India, then the Confederate flag can be a positive symbol for Southerners’ reverence for the bravery of their ancestors. 

I am tired of hearing Democrats like Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi condemn the South for Charlottesville.  Biden mentioned Charlottesville again in his speech at Independence Hall.  There was violence at the confrontation in Charlottesville, but it came from both sides.  The side that started the confrontation was the one that wanted to remove the Confederate statues which had been there for decades.  The initiative did not come from the Southerners, but from the anti-Southerners.  The Southern sympathizer who killed a woman with his car was more a crazy person than a protester.  We know there are many crazy people in the US who seem to be killing many people for many different reasons, often not understandable ones. 

Biden was elected mainly by the black vote, which was motivated by Congressman Jim Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden.  Biden’s campaign was going nowhere until Clyburn’s endorsement. Biden knows that he owes a debt to the black community, and he is paying it in his current campaign speeches.  He thinks he is being moral, but his remarks are more politically than morally motivated.   

White Southerners are not born as immoral, evil human beings, as the Democrats and Critical Race Theory claim.  If, as the Declaration of Independence claims, “all men are crated equal,” then that applies to white Southerners as well.