ON MATTERS OF DUBIOUS INTEREST
First, you should know that there was not one mention of Hegseth or the boat bombings in all the New York Times headlines yesterday morning. How low have the mighty fallen. The Opinion Editor did have a two-minute video that offered nothing new. So much for “the paper of record.” Continue reading “Hegseth, Rotten to the Core”
Nobody really trusts the media now, so I asked Gemini to replay some of Jeffrey Epstein’s insults to Trump in the recently released horde of materials. . . . Well, they may have been friends once. Continue reading “Trump and Epstein Cannot Escape AI”
With so much at stake why do our Democratic shutdown negotiators look like wimps? Paralyzed with fear of being outmatched in the shutdown dispute, they whine and act like members of a high school debating team. Still, a few people on Our Side have recognized the value of humor and used it to good effect. Continue reading “Negotiation Is A Serious Business?”
Rick Wilson, the former Republican strategist turned author of Everything Trump Touches Dies, has always been a noisemaker. His acerbic criticisms of Trump are well documented. Now he speaks out about the recent Trump-Musk debacle and raises an important point many have overlooked because we are all on tenterhooks to find out who’s the biggest bigot here. Continue reading “Another Thought about the
Marvelous Cat Fight”
Now we have Jeanine Pirro, queen of plastic surgery and maniacal statements who also needs a brain transplant. She is coming to Washington as inerim US attorney for DC. Pirro adds to a total of now 21, I think, ex-Fox halfwits appointed to high posts by Trump. A 7-year-old piece from my work in progress shows this is nothing new. What a talent pool. Continue reading “The Trump-Fox Feedback Loop”
Mort Sahl was a great comic from the 1950s. He knew we can’t stop predicting the future. But we need to try understanding what lies ahead in the Trumpian chaos, how to oppose it, how to give it a context. We so-called elites are cowed and stymied. How can one possibly meet the threats? Continue reading “Mort Sahl: The Future Lies Ahead”
Some of us remember that great movie, Dr. Strangelove (1964), in which Peter Sellers can’t restrain his impulse to give the Nazi salute. It looked like Elon was overtaken by the same urge, and he even turned around and gave it twice. Continue reading “Elon Appeared Sixty Years Ago”
Everyone has had it in for the media for a while now. It’s much worse with the polarization, and many now find the news irrelevant, especially the political news. That’s not true across the board, of course, but even some liberals, including me, have lost faith in the reporting we get. It’s tiresome, repetitive and frequently uninformed. Continue reading “Watching the News. Or Not?”
moment of silence for 9/11 victims
Despite the furor about his recent appointments, Trump hasn’t changed all that much. He still executes the same performance at rallies, peddling the same bullshit but more so. He feels invincible, I think, but many of us feel outrage fatigue. We are tired of his unpredictability and bored with his schtick.
We news junkies seem to be vastly dependent on polling in this most fraught of elections. That’s a big mistake. As has been many times demonstrated, the polls often conflict and are thus wrong. The “why so?” is complicated, as Robert Kuttner explained in The American Prospect. He cites Michael Podhorzer,
who astutely points out that all polling is “opinion journalism.” Why? Because pollsters make assumptions about who is a likely voter and how to weigh or overweigh different demographic groups. “The ‘opinions’ are not about issues or ideology, but about methodological approaches.”
There is a long history of presidential polls being wrong, some of which is explained here. The pattern has remained unchanged for about a hundred years. The polls now predict no better than they did then. Even so, the polling practice has proliferated. It’s a business, after all, and following polls can be addictive.
Last month, Pew came out with a study, “Key things to know about U.S. election polling in 2024.” It’s a little more positive than I’ve suggested, maybe because Pew is a major pollster. A big problem, they say, is predicting who will actually vote.
Roughly a third of eligible Americans do not vote in presidential elections, despite the enormous attention paid to these contests. Determining who will abstain is difficult because people can’t perfectly predict their future behavior – and because many people feel social pressure to say they’ll vote even if it’s unlikely.
Nate Cohn in a recent NY Times post says, “The newer opt-in [online] pollsters haven’t fared any better,” and newer ones keep popping up. So Why are they doing no better than traditional polls? The problem is, as always, “how to find a representative sample without the benefit of random sampling, in which everyone has an equal chance of being selected for a poll.”
Instead, the internet has made things messier and more difficult. So many problems in verifying the data, and so few solutions. I found another fascinating study that illustrates a difficulty other than what the critics have been talking about. Axios summarized it this way: There are stark gaps between what Americans say they think and what they really think about hot-button political issues.
I think the findings from that new study are amazing. To wit, how the general public [61% of all Americans] misrepresents its views:
You can check out more of these results here (scroll to Key Findings). If indeed valid, what these outcomes plainly mean is that nearly all public opinion polling sampling may be invalid. Can pollsters ever really discover how people are going to vote?
