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
    21·
    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.