The pollsters were way off. Again.
Sure, there were a couple outfits that, prior to Election Day, said the race between Trump and Biden was going to be close, but most portrayed Biden as way ahead.
Instead, it’s a squeaker.
Still, Biden’s pulling ahead — Michigan was declared for the Democrat as I type this.
Before we blame the pollsters for drawing the wrong conclusions from their data, let’s not draw the wrong conclusions from the most important data of all: Tuesday’s actual votes.
We must remember: people vote for and against candidates for a variety of reasons — personal, tribal, single-issue, broad-spectrum, you-name-it. But how do we determine their actual political values?
Here’s one good indicator, voting . . . on ballot measures.
From Tuesday’s elections we learn, at the very least, that the American people are not foursquare behind the socialistic pandering of Kamala Harris.
Just before Election Day, the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate explained why equality of treatment wasn’t enough: people must be compensated for their past disadvantages, to make outcomes equal. She was pushing a recent meme common on the left, framed as “equality” versus “equity.”
Mrs. Harris may be on her way to Number One Observatory Circle (the vice president’s residence) and then the White House, but Americans aren’t onboard her socialistic egalitarianism. On Tuesday, her home-state Californians repealed Proposition 16, which would have stricken down an equal rights measure of the 1990s in favor of a compensatory hiring and firing scheme based on racial qualifications.
Woke socialists really like this sort of thing. Yet supposedly ultra-blue (pink?) Californians defeated it 56/44.
Once the politics of personality and party are put aside, Americans are not as divided as the political class wishes we were.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “Best Indicator”
You might not have seen it, but Arizona’s Maricopa County has a clear case of voter suppression. Voters were given markers instead of pens to fill out their ballots. The ballot could not be scanned and was discarded by the poll worker, who then denied the voter another ballot. Here in NJ, our instructions for mail in ballots included a warning not to use markers. Should we think the poll workers didn’t know what they were doing and that they didn’t do it deliberately? If this happened in Arizona, where else did it happen? Where there’s one, there’s another and another case of manipulation of the vote.
I don’t really care how wrong the pollsters and prognosticators were. All they did was damage their own credibility. Why should anyone believe them ever again? Anyway, any American who lets media predictions influence how or if he votes probably shouldn’t vote at all.
“Repeal” isn’t the right word for a proposition. Proposition 16 was an initiative, not a referendum. So it had never gone into effect, or even been approved by anybody. More appropriate terms would be “rejected”, “turned down”, etc. Perhaps the confusion comes from the fact that the effect of Proposition 16, if it had passed, would be to repeal a _previous_ proposition, the one that added the non-discrimination language to the state constitution.
Were the pollsters really wrong, or was it just an attempt to discourage Republicans from voting by having them think it was a waste of time.