Historically speaking, presidents that bucked the polls and ignored the majority — or, worse, used propaganda to manipulate opinion so they could cite polls later — have done more damage than those who just listened to the people most of the time & led when they thought necessary
The criticism of polls that some politicians just blindly follow them to win elections missed the mark. It’s a straw man set up by contrarian opinion columnists, minority lawmakers, and other elites so they can argue against giving the public opinion its proper due in Washington.
The other big argument in the lit — that “leadership” stands in tension with looking at polls — is both a false dichotomy and predicated on the idea that the people make bad judgments and are too dumb for self-government, which isn’t borne out in the scholarship.
When you see people arguing against the polls, ask yourself what interest they might have in advancing these old tired points. Often, they have something to lose if the people make gains.
(I’m somewhat willing to give Walter Lippmann a pass here because we didn’t have systematic evaluations of voters’ decision-making and polling’s influence in 1920, but 100 years and thousands of empirical studies later, the argument falls way short of the evidence.)
The widespread approval of Japanese internment during WWII is a great example of government, media and opinion leaders corrupting the people, rather than a case for never trusting the polls. Good public opinion requires good-faith leadership—sometimes those conditions aren’t met!
Americans ware legitimately cruel toward Japanese immigrants and native-born Japanese-Americans during WWII, don’t get me wrong. My point is that it’s not _exclusively_ their fault. (Not trying to dismiss it, just making a point in a wider argument about public opinion.)
One thing to note, across Pew’s postmortems and others’, is that the “solution” to 2016/2020 seems to be an increased reliance on weighting, more investment in sophisticated sampling techniques, or both — neither of which are readily available to firms without a ton of resources.
High-quality public opinion research is still possible, both online and off, but this means that we should expect more variance in good polls and more bias in bad polls. Not a great situation to be in, and the bandaids being proposed don’t really fix the underlying issues.
Lots of right-leaning commentary on democracy recently has advocated for restricting the franchise to people who are “better” at making decisions, with very little — if any — attention paid to the vast social science literature on this topic. Some things worth thinking about:
Obviously, these arguments are situated in a context of historical racism — whites used the exact same justification to disenfranchise black voters throughout the Jim Crow south. Oh, if they can’t pass literacy tests, why should they get to vote? *wink*
In addition to that, tho:
The fundamental problem with this is that, in a democracy, “majority rules” really is the only legitimate decision rule for government action. You can talk about the dangers of crowds, etc, but those fears are relatively unfounded in representative govs. gelliottmorris.substack.com/p/democracy-is…
It will be impossible to enact federal laws/rules preventing state election subversion — or at least substantially lowering the risk of it from the current (relatively) high level — so long as Republicans are driving partisan radicalization against democracy and free outcomes.
I view the point from @Nate_Cohn and others that Dems have missed the mark on HR1 bc of an overestimation of harms to turnout as a valid , tho maybe a bit beside the point that the gov cannot pass reasonable remedies so long as (a) our institutions are biased toward a party...
...that (b) views their opponent’s victories as illegitimate regardless of the conditions of their victory. HR1 probably won’t save democracy, but the solution is probably not attainable right now anyway. It is better to go ahead and reduce harms to voters in light of that.
For starters, +4 on the generic ballot is probably around where Democrats need to be to keep the House. For another thing, we don't really know how passing a bunch of laws with 70% support and saving the country from the pandemic is going to go politically (but it probably helps)
Biden's approval rating is not where it would normally need to be for Dems to hold the House -- but those past rules probably don't fit right now, given polarization. you can probably pack a similar punch with a lower number these days v in 1950
A blog post: Poli sci only offers limited evidence to forecast the impacts of new voting laws in places like GA & TX.
Regardless of those effects, the fabricated motivation and clear intent to bias outcomes toward the GOP is a necessary part of the story. gelliottmorris.substack.com/p/electoral-ma…
This is my preferred take on voting laws.
Any attempts to restrict the franchise are normatively bad, regardless of their effects. Coverage should reflect that.
To be clear, I think Nate is right on the poli sci evidence he discusses, but other work (cc @hill_charlotte) shows bigger fx and I'm wary of (a) applying it to GA & other states, and (b) conditioning on the worst parts of the law to focus on the numbers.