Summations Only

Education education education. We train our youths to take tests and that's it. A good education is not something that seems to be sought after the nation over since it is so hard to come by. College is fucking expensive and all you learn in high school is how to take tests (thanks to No Child Left Behind). This has spilled over and now intellectualism is a dirty word and people want their leaders to be their drinking buddy. They don't want to hear $20 words, they want to hear someone that speaks on their level.

realclearpolitics.comThey disabled the single page of all the candidates against Obama. Obama beats them all as of recent, Rummy the best shot, Appalling does the next best, then Sanctomonius and 4th, of the remaining idiots, is The Grinch.

Republicans are more of a brand than a political party. So many of their positions have nothing to do with how a country should be run. They have created a climate where voting for a Democrat is equivalent to voting for Satan. Sadly, this removes any chance that the two parties may have to actually work together to solve problems. Taxes must ALWAYS be lowered, at all times. Anyone who does not agree is a satan loving atheist Democrat.

You have to remember that it is only a minority of voters are voting in the Republican primaries. If a state has closed primaries and the state is split 50/50 between Dems and Reps then only 50% of state can vote, and primaries have very poor turnout. We are probably talking about 15% of voters actually turn out for primaries. This is why they try to appeal to the nutters, because those people do tend to vote at a higher rate.

I don't have any data to back this up, but even that number seems high. When someone can clearly win with less than 100 votes separating them, and the results can be known within a week or so, there can't be too many votes cast in total.

"But the US seems to be in a particular right wing frenzy at the moment. The "middle ground" seems more to the right than anywhere else in the developed world. And the two party system seems to be moving ever "rightwards"."That is something that has mad me puzzled far some time. Id say that we in Europe do not have a single large political party that is as far-right as the Democrats over there. That tells a lot about the Republicans.Another thing that Ive been thinking a lot is how on earth can Newt honestly start campaigning for Romney against Obama after all this hate and mudslinging. I mean if Newt has been trying to prove the American public what a weasel and lier Romney has been, how can such a crook be worth the Presidency in his mind then?

Intelligence Study Links Low I.Q. To Prejudice, Racism, Conservatism | HuffPost ImpactAnyone see this Huff article? wow!Edited by 1.61803, : No reason given.

This is but one reason, in a myriad of them, why I pay no attention to polls. Like you said, only a handful of people are voting in the primaries, and they usually are diehard politickers.Secondly, polling is often manipulative. Pollsters are often asking questions in a specific way to get the answer they desire.Thirdly, it's unreliable at best. One polling agency report virtually the exact opposite of another.More to the point, it creates a false sense of security and fosters self-fulfilling prophecies. The media has a tremendous amount of fault in this, reporting these polls, thus giving the viewer a skewed idea of who is "in the lead." Because of this, people are more apt to vote for whoever will get the other guy out of office rather than simply voting for who you think is the best candidate.And most importantly, what fucking difference does it make what other people are voting for? Who gives a crap. All that should ever matter are the reasons YOU want a candidate to win.I pay no attention to these polls and strongly encourage others to do the same.

That's why it is better to average the polls together, perhaps leaving out any outliers. This tends to dampen down on bias, intended or otherwise. For two reasons. One, it shows you how well your preferred candidate is doing. Granted, polls are much more useful to the actual campaign staff than the average person, but being curious we like to know what others think.Two, most people aren't binary. It's not like "I like candidate A and all other candidates suck." It's more along the lines of, "I like candidate A best, but candidate B is ok, too, however, candidate C is absolutely terrible." If your number one has no chance of winning, but switching to candidate B, who may not be ideal, but is pretty good, might get B over the top to defeat C, then knowing the polls could help you make that choice. This is a valid reaction to polls, but it smacks of giving little care to the actual outcome, merely to your part in the process.

Or dismiss them all out of hand. But I challenge that it does that. I think it does the opposite. I think it tends to create a bias unnecessarily. They say "throwing away your vote" is voting for someone you think has no electability. I say voting for the lesser of two evils is throwing your vote away. If you don't really like a candidate, but like them slightly better than another candidate, you're still settling for someone who doesn't deserve your vote.I would rather write-in who I actually want to be president.

Only if there's a bias in the data. If the bias is dampened or filtered out by averaging the polls from both conservative and liberal, both democratic and republican, etc, then you're closer to working with raw data. Under normal decision making scenarios, I'd agree with you. But when the decision ends up putting someone in charge of a vast army and nuclear capability, the decision becomes harder.For example, candidate A is you preference, you agree with everything s/he stands for.Candidate C is batshit crazy and you seriously fear that if s/he is in charge, there is a greater chance of a nuclear exchange with, say Iran.Then there's candidate B. S/he agrees with you on many things, disagrees with you on others, but you're pretty sure the nuclear attack possibility is about the same as with your preferred candidate.Now, it is clear that candidate A has no chance to win, but candidate B and C are in a statistical dead heat. You can vote for A, feel that you voted for the person you really wanted and just walk away, or you can decide that it is a moral imperative that candidate C not be allowed in.Especially if candidate B is pretty close to what you want anyways, it woudl seem to be a pretty easy choice.Now, if B and C are both batshit crazy, then, yeah, by all means, vote for A and do your best to keep batshit crazy out of office.

I should have clarified. What I mean is that these polls tend to create self-fulfilling prophecies. It leads the horse to water. Those who liked Paul or Santorum may all of a sudden shift their views in favor of Romney or Gingrich, simply because they're "winning in the polls." So the burgeoning question would be how people would vote if there was a total media blackout.I, for one, would love to see a controlled study on that very thing. Yeah, but if both candidates have similar tendencies, then it really doesn't matter. I would not like that on my conscience. Look at the debacle with Obama. He simply expanded Bush's policies when he was voted to stop them.

It can potentially make a very, very large difference.Do you recall Florida in the 2000 election? "Hanging chads," and Bush taking the state by the skin of his Supreme Court ruling? I do.The Green Party split the Democrat vote in Florida. If even a quarter of those who voted Green (knowing that their candidate had no chance of winning from polling and past trends) had instead voted Democrat, we would have avoided the Bush presidency. While we very well may still ahve wound up in a war with Afghanistan, we almost certainly would never have invaded Iraq. I can see no policy where Gore would have made a worse decision than Bush, and at least a few where the outcome would have been better. And at the very least, several hundred thousand Iraqis would almost certainly be alive today.I agree that it's bullshit. I agree that it's not right. But the American presidential election is a winner-takes-all affair. Voting for the guy you really like often just winds up taking away a vote from the guy you at least don't hate. A vote for the Green Party in Florida in 2000 was just another vote for Bush, effectively...and I don't imagine that any of those Green voters preferred Bush to Gore.So here's the deal: I don't like Obama. He's managed to at best disappoint me on some matters, and on a plurality of others I find him to be reprehensible. He mishandled the healthcare debacle (while what we're getting is better than it was, it's still ridiculously awful compared to what we should have gotten with a Democrat House, Senate, AND Presidency). He took nearly his entire first term to get us out of Iraq, and that only happened because Iraq refused to continue to give Americans legal immunity, not because Obama decided it was time for us to leave. Guantanamo Bay is still open for business. Nobody who ordered or performed torture has or will be prosecuted. We violate the sovereignty of other nations and blow up their citizens with no due process (including innocent civilians, a drone cannot tell a Taliban member from a random Afghani citizen, and we've fired missiles at weddings) as a matter of course. The USA PATRIOT Act is still in force, and the executive branch under Obama continues to make massive power grabs. Obama signed a law that allows anyone to simply be imprisoned indefinitely without trial, in direct violation of the Constitution and basically all of American law since the beginning.I really, really don't like him. He gets a few things right. Just a few. But usually it's when he has no other choice anyway (Iraq), and most of his efforts when he moves in the direction I'd like are done sluggishly and halfheartedly.I'd very much rather not vote for him. Give me a viable 3rd party candidate. Hell, give me Dennis Kucinich! I'd even give Hillary a try, she strikes me as having more of a spine, and universal healthcare was a major issue of hers back when she was First Lady.But look at reality: Obama is going up against either Romney (most likely) or Gingrich (ha!) in 2012. Some number of third party candidates will also run and utterly fail to collectively win more than 10% of the vote put together. Their names will not matter, they will not win a single state. They will serve only to take actual voters away from either Obama or the Republican candidate.I hate Romney and Gingrich. I hate them both, because I think they will be exactly the same as Obama on all of the things I just talked about...without even sluggish and halfhearted attempts toward anything I actually agree with. I feel like both parties want to fuck me, but the Democrats will at least use lube, and the Republicans have multiple STDs.I cannot have what I really want. It will not happen; polls tell me that even if a third party were to have a candidate I could fully support, that candidate will not win. The next President of the United States will be either a Democrat or a Republican, end of story.If I were in a swing state (and I'm not, thankfully), a vote for a third party would be another vote that Obama does not have...making the threshold for a Republican victory one vote lower. A vote for the candidate I really want is effectively a vote for the candidate I hate the most.Florida in 2000 was not the only closely-won swing state to have determined an election. Its happened several times throughout history. While I don't think Obama will have much trouble against either Romney or Gingrich, it's possible that we could see some states close enough that the 3rd-party votes would have been relevant to the election as a whole.When I vote, I vote according to not only my conscience in isolation, but also taking into account the likely outcomes of my vote. American Presidential elections are a Prisoner's Dilemma, and choosing what I want the most without considering the consequences of other people's choices (as learned through polling and historical trends) can result in a more negative outcome than if I chose #2 on my list.

It's all speculative assuming no polls were reported, which is fundamentally what I'm referring to. I obviously understand why it's done, I just find that a very unfortunate reality.I would be very interested in conducting an experiment where there is essentially a media blackout for one control group, and the other group it's business as usual and search for noticeable anomalies or disparities between the two.