Political Theatre category archive

Via Juanita Jean.

Via SFGate comes a Washington Post article exploring a brief history of political polling in the U. S., as well as of pollsters’ history of blowing it big time in presidential elections.

And PoliticalProf offers a link to an article exploring why the polls were, as my old boss would have said, in error and why they may never be right again.

Grant Marek, writing at SFGate, runs the numbers. A snippet:

Especially compared to San Francisco, where 190 garages in the city are turned into polling places, and there are 588 total voting locations for just under 900,000 people, which equals one polling location for every 1,579 people in the city.

Compare that to Fulton County in Georgia (which includes Atlanta): There are 255 polling places for more than 1 million people, or 1 polling place for every 4,172 voters.

More numbers at the link.

Hate-full twits.

I guess it should be no surprise that the most popular dance amongst Trump supporters appears to be the Jerk.

No surprises here.

Several weeks ago, The Denver Post explored rumors that spread on social media of incidents of voter intimidation in Denver, but which in fact were unfounded. Buried the middle of the article was this telling observation (emphasis added).

It started with political flyers in mailboxes that made claims against opposing candidates, Hupfeld said (Kelly Hupfeld of the University of Colorado Denver–ed.). But as social media grew in popularity, people realized its power to sway and “to really remove the foundation of a common truth from us.”

People are relying less on previously trusted sources such as local government and local newspapers, Hupfeld said, and instead on social media, where information may not be verified.

We see this taking place every day, as the newspaper mill is replaced by the electronic rumor mill. (The article goes on to recommend things we can do so as not to get sucked in the maelstrom of lies which passes for political discourse amongst twits on Twitter and frolickers on Facebook–and, now, I guess, twerps on TikTok and yokels on jodel and the list goes on.)

Aside:

This is in no way to downplay the danger of efforts to intimidate voters. They are continuing, and not always at the polls.

But we need to live and vote in the real world.

See the article that Farron discusses.

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*Thomas Jefferson (cite).