We all know that opinion polls are useful. Even in a representative democracy, the opinions, wants, and needs of the people should be known and taken into account, so that the ‘democratic conversation’ can make headway.But I question their usefulness at election time, when the settled will of the people will be known in a few days/weeks time anyway. The hysteria in Iowa and then New Hampshire, concerning the fall-and-rise of Clinton, and the rise-and-fall of Obama, are entirely driven by, and make no sense without opinion polling. Obama’s performance in the latter state was only considered a ‘loss’ because the pollsters had him up by 15%. Had the last polling been a few weeks earlier, the same result would have been a ‘win’.
It is because of polling that politicians change strategy, flip-flop, and say what they think the public want to hear, not what they actually believe. In turn, this duplicity insults the public and demeans the system.
The polling surrounding these Presidential Primaries is ridiculous, and not only because it appears to be so innaccurate. What is the point of calculating these pseudo-results, when a real plebiscite is only days away? Each Primary acts as its own, super-opinion-poll, asking an entire State of people what they think.
What would happen if public opinion polls are banned within one month of an election? Candidates and Election Monitors could still do their own, private polling if they wished, and a more even distribution of the Primaries would mean that the media had an unfolding narrative to report on. We would still have the highs-and-lows, winners and losers (both real and ‘percieved’). But these would be based on tangible results, not conjecture, extrapolation, falsehood, or hyperbole. The Bradley Effect, and insidious concept, would be killed off. Voters would vote for their preferred candidate on the issues, and not suffer the emotional blackmail of being asked to vote ‘tactically’ for what the media tells them is the most electable candidate.
Polling is like a lense, which often allows us to magnify and understand a political issue. But at election time, these lenses do nothing but distort, and the picture we see is uglier than it should be.
Tag: USA (Page 22 of 27)
So, Obama lost narrowly in New Hampshire, an alleged victim of the Bradley Effect. This is the apparent phenomenon of White voters saying they’ll vote for a black candidate, but then actually voting for the white candidate when they get into the polling booth. People apparently want to appear liberal when they answer the pollster’s questions.
That Obama is the victim of such a phenomenon may actually be true, but it is an explanation that makes me uneasy nonetheless. It is not really a falsifiable assertion, and is therefore open to abuse.
Further, I think the previous arguments of the Obama campaign and its supporters precludes the use of the Bradley Effect excuse. The campaign rhetoric is all about how Senator Obama inspires Americans to look beyond skin colour, and unite. A main reason to vote for him is that he is able to transcend race and vault clean over any Bradley Effect. He cannot then claim that he has been tripped up by that same political phenomenon, without undermining one of the central tenets of his campaign.
I note that the last seven posts on the Liberal Conspiracy have been about the US Primaries (I’ve been posting musings here too). This might seem odd for a group site that is supposedly concerned with the direction of the British Liberal-Left.
But let us have no apologies. Who can blame us for lapping up anything which undermine the cynicism of politics-as-usual? In analysing yesterday’s Democrat debate, Xpostfactoid makes some interesting points about the nature of politics and campaigning:
Politics is almost literally all talk. You’ve got to be good in the cloak room, at the negotiating table, on the debate floor. What gives a politician the ultimate strength to push through change, though, is to convince the mass of voters to support his or her effort for something major like health care reform. “Don’t discount that power, because when the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens.” That says it all. That’s a real political philosophy at its deepest. (via Andrew)
It also provokes column inches and blog posts, generating momentum that magnifies such power. As we await the next wave of primaries, it is beginning to feel as if our American cousins are about to create a historical, political ‘moment’ that has spun out of control of the spinners. The last such ‘moment’ we had in British Politics was Mr Brown’s clammy handling of the early election decision. You will excuse me if I keep my attention fixed on New Hampshire, where altogether more inspiring events are unfolding.
Over at the Liberal Conspiracy, everyone has caught Primary Fever. JamieK thinks that Hilary Clinton may use Barack Obama’s middle name and tenuous links to Islam to unsettle his campaign. I doubt that she would stoop that low, but it looks like the Republicans may well seek to use it against him in the General Election Campaign later in the year (should he win the nomination, of course). Some on the right have already test-driven the Muslim slur (via) but it is so crass as to be parody:
As defenders of this great Republic, and of the pinnacle of Western civilization that it represents, we should all come together tonight and agree on a common strategy that will keep the White House from becoming a madrassa.
This sort of attack – that Obama is some kind of Muslim Manchurian Candidate – are easily rebutted, and the majority of the American electorate will scoff at the suggestion, and anyone who dares to make it.
However, the issue of his middle name will persist, for slightly subtler reasons. Whether Obama faces the uber-hawk Rudolph Guiliani, the evangelical Mike Huckerbee, or some other candidate in the November election, his Republican opponent will insinuate that Muslims at home or abroad are lesser people than those of the Christian faith, and imply that any sympathy or understanding Obama may have for these ‘others’ is essentially a lack of judgement. Elsewhere in the world, Obama’s multi-ethnic heritage is seen as positive trait, which should enable him to better understand someone else’s point of view. But in the USA, in an election-year, this risks being spun as a trait which means his priorities lie elsewhere, and that he will not always “put America first”.
Note that is concern should not be reason for Democrats to vote against an Obama candidacy (although if Senator Clinton does “go negative”, then that is precisely the argument she will make). Rather, it just means that the Obama campaign needs to neutralise such attacks at an early stage. Let us hope that Senator Obama, clearly an excellent orator, has already composed the rhetoric to see off this insidious, divisive red-herring.
A rewarding essay on Barak Obama in The Atlantic, ‘Goodbye to All That‘, by Andrew Sullivan. The thesis is that of the current crop of candidates for President, only Obama can heal America’s political chest-wound, a wound created by the Baby-Boomers in the 1960s and 70s.
She and Giuliani are conscripts in their generation’s war. To their respective sides, they are war heroes. … Of the viable national candidates, only Obama and possibly McCain have the potential to bridge this widening partisan gulf … If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man.
There is also an interesting passage on the issue of Obama’s race, and his reconcilliation of his different identities, or rather, narratives. Its a dichotomy that comes knocking for all those who are of mixed race, or of immigrant heritage, and something that a greater proportion of people will face in generations to come:
In Dreams From My Father, Obama tells the story of a man with an almost eerily nonracial childhood, who has to learn what racism is, what his own racial identity is, and even what being black in America is. And so Obama’s relationship to the black American experience is as much learned as intuitive. He broke up with a serious early girlfriend in part because she was white. He decided to abandon a post-racial career among the upper-middle classes of the East Coast in order to reengage with the black experience of Chicago’s South Side. It was an act of integration—personal as well as communal—that called him to the work of community organizing.
This restlessness with where he was, this attempt at personal integration, represents both an affirmation of identity politics and a commitment to carving a unique personal identity out of the race, geography, and class he inherited. It yields an identity born of displacement, not rootedness.
Sullivan, erstwhile war-cheerleader turned ferocious war-critic, notes the sageness of Obama being “against dumb wars” too.