The US is ranked as a 'Flawed Democracy', what needs to change?

[Bofferbrauer2]

Chrkeller said:

Eagle367 said:

You are being a little disingenuous. And you should know better as a statistician. You can look at methodologies and what separates a bad poll from a good poll. You can critique individual polls too. The way and framing of questions is part of that. Just dismissing them outright though is weird.

And wait who said Hillary was supposed to decimate Trump? Everyone who looked closely at the elections was saying she's a bad candidate and it shouldn't have been her. Hell there was an entire scandal about the Clinton foundation using funding they gave to the DNC to make sure she won over Bernie. What people were saying was she would get more votes and she did. 

As for the question of people knowing or not knowing what they vote for, read manufactured consent. Also maybe look into the history of brainwashing and political maneuvering.  Messaging and perception have shown to be more effective than actual good policies people themselves want in countries where media literacy training is not taught. That's why teaching children how to get knowledge is way more important than maths, science, and all the things people thinks schools should be for. It's not that people are dumb, it's that we are people and people fall for things. Even the most intelligent of us, unless we are taught about and know how to avoid these tactics. Even then we fall for some of it. You and me and everyone here and everyone in the world.

Those with media literacy and taught critical thinking skills just fare better. Unfortunately those people are not the majority in the world because a properly educated population is a threat to the political careers of I would say most of the world politicians.

I'll take your two major points in one link. 

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/why-2016-election-polls-missed-their-mark/

1) Hillary was predicted as the HEAVY favorite according to polls....   

I don't get why pollsters are still throwing this myth around. Would they just have a good look at their own (and other pollsters numbers, and they'd know what's up:

While Trump won the electoral college, Hillary still won the popular vote by about 2%, or almost 3 Million people. Polls taken during the last 2 weeks before the election showed Hillary's support crumbling, fluctuating wildly between -5% and +7% of the popular vote, though most of them between 3% and 4%. While that's a bit higher than what she got in the end, it's still within the margin of error. Heck, if you take the mean value between the extremes, you come with just a measly 1% lead, even less than she carried in the end.

But in their calculations, they took the numbers of the entire last month, which includes also leads of up to 15%. Of course this skews the prediction very much in favor of Hillary despite those numbers being outdated. This is what went wrong with the polling, they looked too far back and had their predictions wrong due to that.