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Forums - Politics Discussion - The US is ranked as a 'Flawed Democracy', what needs to change?

the-pi-guy said:
Chrkeller said:

People don't know what they are voting for or people do know what they are voting for and the average person doesn't believe what we think they do.  I believe in the latter absolutely 100%.  But too each their own.  

I agree that polls can be questionable, because they're tricky to carry out. You have to ask a variety of people, and you have to ask the right question. Both things are important.

Personally I find most people don't understand what they're voting for.

Like "Defund the police". The vast majority of democrats did not want to eliminate police departments, most of them didn't even want to reduce funding. That did not stop many Republicans (voters and politicians alike) from believing they wanted to literally eliminate police departments.

There is absolutely a difference between reality and perception. That's the whole reason why propaganda, myths, marketing, conspiracy theories exist. 

People also vote for all kinds of different reasons.

Most of my in-laws vote based on exactly 1 policy. Doesn't matter if that politician wanted to gut healthcare, or wanted a single payer option, they vote based on that one policy.

Sometimes people vote based on the person.

A major problem with your hypothesis is that we barely ever vote for policies. We pretty much always vote for people, based on what they promise to do, and then we complain about it when don't. The fact that policies weren't implemented doesn't mean that people don't support those policies. 

Fair points.  I agree with a lot of it.  For me "defund the police" is just a bad tagline.  "Reorganisation of law enforcement" is a lot less polarising, granted it is not as catchy.  People also vote on a single policy, that is true as well. 

I used to think people didn't know what they were voting for, but two things changed my mind.  The first being I have heard that every 2 years for over 20 years straight...  at some point one has to start wondering/questioning.  The other change was when I moved to the south.  I don't know where you live nor do I want to make any assumptions, but moving from the north to the south was eye opening.  I can't drive more than 100 ft without seeing a "Let's Go Brandon" sign (either yard or sticker on a car).  When I lived in the north I thought the media was accurate in cascading what the average person wanted/believed.  Now that I live in the south, yeah I don't anymore. 

Either way, I can compromise to a middle ground.  Fair, many don't know what they are voting for.  But I do think the "conservative minority" is larger than presented in media.  



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Chrkeller said:

I used to think people didn't know what they were voting for, but two things changed my mind.  The first being I have heard that every 2 years for over 20 years straight...  at some point one has to start wondering/questioning.  The other change was when I moved to the south.  I don't know where you live nor do I want to make any assumptions, but moving from the north to the south was eye opening.  I can't drive more than 100 ft without seeing a "Let's Go Brandon" sign (either yard or sticker on a car).  When I lived in the north I thought the media was accurate in cascading what the average person wanted/believed.  Now that I live in the south, yeah I don't anymore. 

I live in a fairly white conservative part of the midwest. Which admittingly has some very blue cities, but I've never lived in those cities.

There's a lot of gerrymandering here. In 2018, Democrats won the vote by over 8%, and yet only got 36 seats, whereas Republicans got 63, despite the massive win.

Sometimes it's more important to ask what people think they're voting against, rather than what they're voting for. (There's also a partisan factor that a lot of people love to vote for Trump, even if there was  Democratic politician with the same views, they wouldn't like as much.)

Last edited by the-pi-guy - on 02 November 2022

Chrkeller said:
the-pi-guy said:

Most people do want these things depending on how they're asked

What the exact question that gets asked is important. If you ask if Americans want more gun restrictions for mentally ill people, the vast majority of Americans support that restriction. If you ask for universal background checks, the vast majority of Americans (Republicans and Democrats, both above 70%) support that.

If you start asking about blanket gun bans, then you start getting a lot more pushback against that, especially amongst Republicans.

Gallup polling

Vox polling on Republicans and Democrats

It's a similar trend with healthcare. It depends on what question you actually ask. If you ask about a single payer system, there's a lot more pushback for that. If you ask if there should be a medicare/medicaid option available for everyone, there's substantially more support for that.

A bigger issue at hand is that when you bring up something like "gun restrictions", people tend to assume that means the absolute most disagreeable thing it could possibly mean.   

Chrkeller said:

Being born and raised here.  Knowing how my friends and family vote.  Oh and I am a registered democrat and vote as such.  I'm just telling the truth, which upsets people.  The core beliefs of the average american isn't what people think it is.  This is especially true in the mid-west and south.  

Personally I think Republicans pick up sets this November...  if the average american believed what people think they do....  republicans would get decimated at the polls...  fact is, Republicans are not and are doing quite well over the last decade.  

No one here is upset by the truth. But these things are more complicated than you're talking about. 

A major issue at hand here is that there is a big difference between what most Americans think Republicans and Democrats are, and what the reality actually is. 


Republican voters tend to be more moderate than Republican politicians.

Now, a new study finds that members of Congress also believe that they represent staunchly conservative electorates that do not actually exist.

If you actually ask people about their positions, a lot of times they have positions that are very in line with a typical Democratic politician, and yet they vote Republican. And then they start talking about Democrats, and they have very extreme views on where they think Democrats are.

There is a big perception difference between where the typical Democratic and Republican politician is, and where their voters think they are. Republicans think Republican politicians are less extreme than they really are, and they think Democrats are much more extreme than they really are. 

As somebody who does statistics for a living, polls are questionable.  Ask 11,000 people..  which people are being asked?  People in New York will have much different views than somebody in Alabama.  There are two ways of looking at it.  People don't know what they are voting for or people do know what they are voting for and the average person doesn't believe what we think they do.  I believe in the latter absolutely 100%.  But too each their own.  

Again, Hillary was suppose to decimate Trump...  how did that work out?  And I say this as somebody who never has nor never will vote Trump.  There is a massive disconnect between election results and what we think people want....  I'm not going to brush it off as "people are stupid and don't know what they are voting for."  I don't believe that is the case at all.  But again to each their own.

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.



Just a guy who doesn't want to be bored. Also

Eagle367 said:
Chrkeller said:

As somebody who does statistics for a living, polls are questionable.  Ask 11,000 people..  which people are being asked?  People in New York will have much different views than somebody in Alabama.  There are two ways of looking at it.  People don't know what they are voting for or people do know what they are voting for and the average person doesn't believe what we think they do.  I believe in the latter absolutely 100%.  But too each their own.  

Again, Hillary was suppose to decimate Trump...  how did that work out?  And I say this as somebody who never has nor never will vote Trump.  There is a massive disconnect between election results and what we think people want....  I'm not going to brush it off as "people are stupid and don't know what they are voting for."  I don't believe that is the case at all.  But again to each their own.

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....   



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When the United States of America got established, due to it's sheer size and not-yet-existing faster ways of transport and communication, the electoral system made much sense back then. But with the advent of trains and especially the telegraph, it had already become archaic even before the civil war started. And yet it is still in use today, with all it's flaws that make it's voting system very easy to play around.

There are several ways to solve the issue. I'll list some of the potential solutions here:

  1. The easiest way: Make it a 2-step process. On the first round you can vote for whoever you feel like, and if neither gets past 50%, the 2 candidates with the highest results get into a runoff. It's a system that is in place in many other countries, and that way the spoiler effect would be eliminated, since there is nobody else on the second round, just the 2 candidates with the highest results in the first round.
  2. Switch to a single transferable vote system. That way one can still vote for their preferred party without wasting their vote, as they can put the party (or parties) that they don't like to the bottom of the list. The biggest problem is that even in countries who have such a voting system, like Australia, not everybody knows how to vote in those ballots correctly, which can leave the door wide open to some shenanigans from parties who want to force some result.
  3. Outlaw the winner-takes-all system. Winner-takes-all basically forces election over time to become 2-horse races due to tactical voting. Without it, minor parties would also get some chance at representation, which could defuse the increasingly partisan politics of the US, as the result could then very well be that neither gets past 270 electoral votes and thus would have to do a coalition with another party - and royally pissing off a potential coalition partner is simply not an option in such a type of government. It is also one where the electoral college could be a good thing to some degree, as a small party who doesn't have nationwide representation but instead focuses on one or a couple key states would have an easier chance to get representation than getting drowned out in a nationwide proportional election. For those who don't understand what I mean by that, look at the British elections and imagine that the SNP, Sinn Féin and Plaid Cymru would need to win the popular vote in all of the UK instead of just in their regions they're actually representing.
  4. While we're at the topic of the electoral college, it needs to be either abolished, or, with a system like I explained at point 3 above, seriously overhauled. So let's get into ways on how the electoral college could be reformed: The first step: Remove the electors in the electoral college and simply count them as points that a party gets, which removes any possibility of unfaithful electors and the costs of sending hundreds of persons to D.C. just to cast a pointless vote. 2. The number of electoral votes hinges on the amount of senators and house representatives a state has, so a minimum of 3 (2 senators and 1 representative). So either this number gets reduced to a minimum of 1 with the same number of electoral votes, redistributing the freed up electoral votes proportionally by population, or increase the number of total electoral votes so that 3 would actually be representative to the population of the states with the lowest population (For comparison, elections for the European parliament have a minimum of 6, attributed to Luxembourg, Malta and Cyprus (though the latter should have more by now, as it's population rose rapidly in the last decade) and a maximum of 96 for Germany, which also has roughly 16 times the population of Malta or Luxembourg).

I could come with some more suggestions, but I'll leave it at that for now, as it's already quite the wall of text.



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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.



Bofferbrauer2 said:
Chrkeller said:

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.

And you aren't concerned that in a span of 2 months her lead went from 15% to 4%?  Seems like a crazy fluctuation within 60 days.  Personally it makes me question how accurate the original 15% was. 

Look, 2016 simply made me question polls and media.  This whole conversation really started when Bandorr falsely and wrongly accused me of being a conservative conspiracy nut.  My point is really simple, because of 2016 I'm just not convinced our predictions are as accurate as we think they are.  It changed my perspective.

Lots people think this November there will be a bunch of SCOTUS backlash....  I'm not convinced.  Time will tell.    



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Chrkeller said:

Lots people think this November there will be a bunch of SCOTUS backlash....  I'm not convinced.  Time will tell.    

Recent polls say otherwise.

People care more about their daily lives, and think Democrats aren't doing enough, or worse think Democrats are actively making things worse.



the-pi-guy said:
Chrkeller said:

Lots people think this November there will be a bunch of SCOTUS backlash....  I'm not convinced.  Time will tell.    

Recent polls say otherwise.

People care more about their daily lives, and think Democrats aren't doing enough, or worse think Democrats are actively making things worse.

Fair enough, it is has been a bit since I looked at polls.

I think democrats will not do well this November.  Stock market is down, loan forgiveness isn't going over well, etc.  While I don't think democrats are necessarily at fault, I do think they will be blamed this month.  



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538's forecast right now:

85% chance Republicans take the House.

53% chance Republicans take the Senate.