Thread by @BlueSteelDC

I wanted to show the dueling landscape of polls and headlines on a single topic.

This topic Medicare for All.

In the same Journal “the Hill “ You have both a detracting article and a promoting article on M4All within days of each other.

The point: learn to be a more careful consumer of polls and news.

If you present me with an article with a poll:

I am reading the poll.

I am reading the questions.

And sometimes this is where the poll really doesn’t support the headline or agenda

Sometimes it’s to proclaim that something is super popular but another crosstab in the polls show a drop in popularity occurred when more details are explained or a follow up question is posed.

People use polls to push their agenda

Mark Twain famously said

There's lies, damned lies, and statistics." Update that with polls

The problem with agendas is they meet reality. And everyone who ran a competitive race calling for M4All lost

google.com/amp/s/www.forb…

Take a headline about polls with a grain of salt

The polls themselves arent trying to trick you, if you read the source it includes the margin of error, the news source won’t.

It’s like a game of telephone - key info gets lost in the retelling

As example I have read news headlines proclaiming most popular car.

But when you read the polling it was based on a short list of ten vehicles with only 4 were cars.

Car = politician

Some polls tell you up front the sample size was too small and it had higher than acceptable margin of error.

But that poll was used as the basis for a number of articles and think pieces.

Fun game -review the past articles on your favorite pundits and see how often their wrong

I don’t want you to throw out the importance of polling.

Polling is data. But you should learn to be good consumers on accessing the reliability of that data.

Break your habit of looking for info only to back up your beliefs

Why I don’t do that is because I have worked in professions that habit isn’t helpful to me.

Telling me what I want to hear and only what I want to hear - would lead to a very painful Election Day.

I see fellow liberals are too wedded to validating their own opinion

If you really want to win stop doing that.

If you don’t assume something is already popular you at least ready to work on persuasion tactics

I think one of the reasons the far left fared so poorly in the past election in comparison to previous years is they already declared victory before they ran.

And yes don’t believe media hype - the far left underperformed from previous years.

The far left wants to win the headlines more so than actually winning.

Howard Dean in his years running the political operations of the DNC was far more successful promoting further left candidates than Bernie Sanders has been.

Fact

google.com/amp/s/www.poli…

So FYI

Medicare for All is only popular if ppl don’t talk about the details. Then it has a lot of hard to sell provisions

Socialism isn’t actually popular with young ppl. But safety nets are.

Neither is libertarianism- they just think there are too many lifestyle laws

Young people aren’t actually getting more liberal-they are more socially accepting of other people’s lifestyles and the word liberal is wrapped in that definition. They still echo their parents in other ways.

There are more POC in the next generation so that boast left voters

Independents are not automatic liberal voters because you are using Sanders as a guide.

Each state has a different pool of independent, R leaning and D leaning changes from state to state.

But sometimes non registered is lumped into that category and that is actually different

I can’t remember them all but if we didn’t assume all the world was already in agreement- you would at least understand where you have to begin the work of persuading and what points of agreement are persuasive arguments and what would fall flat.

For the last two years - all I heard out of the far left is Democrats are ignoring their voters because these things are already super popular and easy to sell.

But sure enough when the far left went to sell them - it wasn’t super easy and they lost their shirts.

Democrats are politicians -and no they aren’t doing it for donation money.

Do you know candidates don’t personally keep donation money - the point of donation money is to help get elected.

And if something was so popular it made it easier to get elected - that like free money

So saying Democrat are ignoring the people and all these popular idea - so they can get donation money ( that they don’t actually keep but use to win the approval of ppl) - sounds cool at the coffee house but doesn’t add up.

Politicians are hyper sensitive to voter concerns

The reason the far left has not been successful to date is they are not intune

They want to tell voters what they think instead of finding out.

Understanding when support is thin as a sheet of ice on a lake - allow you to take steps to fortify support before stepping out.