Unlimited local calling influences election coverage
Kerry’s up in the polls the night before the election, but no one is calling it yet (except you –Ed ok, no one accountable is calling it). Of course pollsters have been careful of calling an election ever since that famous prediction of Dewey trouncing Truman because the relatively new reliance on phones as a polling method excluded a significant many who didn’t have phones from the data. electoral-vote.com, in addition to continually posting one of the best resources on the web for this election, has some interesting thoughts about possible skewed results, this time because pollsters are moving too slowly.
As I have discussed repeatedly, normally people with a cell phone but no landline are not polled. Most of these are in the 18-29 year old group. Up until now, no one has known how their absence from the polling data might affect the results. Zogby has now conducted a very large (N = 6039) poll exclusively on cell phones using SMS messaging to get a feeling of how they will vote. The results are that they go strongly for Kerry, 55% to 40%, with a margin of error of only 1.2%. If they all vote tomorrow, the pollsters are going to spend the rest of the week wiping egg from their faces. But historically, younger voters have a miserable turnout record, so the pollsters need not yet stock up on paper towels.
Let’s see what kind of a difference death threats from the bad boy family can make in this election. Actually, I think it’s great for people to get out and vote, no matter how misinformed, because a misinformed person that doesn’t vote is more likely to riot, join a militia, or write for Adbusters instead. Voting is a simple participatory act that confirms one’s commitment to liberalism whether one realizes it or not.
UPDATE: How bizarre; turns out that the ‘votemaster’ who runs electoral-vote.com is actually Andrew Tanenbaum. The Computer Science prof and former author of Minux, who is most famous in the popular press for telling Linus Torvalds that he would have failed him for his design of the widely popular Linux kernel.
November 1st, 2004 at 19:44
I thought voting was a simple participatory act that confirmed your commitment to democracy?
November 2nd, 2004 at 04:40
> I thought voting was a simple participatory act that confirmed
> your commitment to democracy?
Not necessarily; ever heard of the phrase, one man, one vote, one time? Or what about the fake elections held every year in so many communist and tyrannical nations?
I’m guessing we’re dealing with shades of difference in our definitions of liberalism and democracy, and where they stand in relation to one another, particularly in the United States in this case. It’s easy to be a nominal democracy, but if you’re not in an honest-to-goodness liberal democracy, what difference does it make? The concept of democracy is at best worthless, and at worst, dangerous, without liberal institutions and proven constitutional protections of freedom. Where these are in place, and the threat of extremist elements capturing the public mood is minimal, the act of voting has a distinct meaning.
November 2nd, 2004 at 12:30
My point was that I don’t think democracy and liberalism are the same thing. (There’s not much point in arguing about definitions of abstract philosophical ideas in blog comments, but I think that you’re including far more in your definition of liberalism than I would.) I, for one, see liberalism as a very loaded term. In the past two centuries, for instance, most western “liberal” states carried out and justified the exclusion of large numbers of individuals from civil society based on race, class, gender, or religion up until very recently. Liberalism does not automatically mean a functioning democracy, just as socialism does not automatically produce tyranny. The great thing about real, working democracies is that they allow for the inclusion of a wide variety of theories of governance, economics, social order, etc. to be represented in the policies of the state. Canada, for instance, is a mish mash of liberal, conservative, socialist, and nationalist institutions based on the diverse wishes of the electorate. To me, real democracy means the ability of citizens to choose whatever philosophical direction they want their country to take within the confines of a system that ensures the continuation of “one person, one vote, one time” and that has some protection of the rights of the minority from that of the majority. Perhaps this is all just useless semantics, and my definition of democracy is essentially the same as your definition of liberalism.
December 31st, 2006 at 14:16
Bacarat Games
archangels pottery inquisitions bonder regressions boiled,launchings Backarat Download http://www.the-baccarat-4.us/backarat-download.html#