Election Polls Quotes

Talk is cheap, voting is free; take it to the polls...

Nevertheless, four years later, at the end of August 2004, a Zogby poll discovered the critical fact that 57 percent of the undecided voters in that year's election would rather have a beer with George Bush than with John Kerry. The question was odd enough on its face, but a nation to which it would matter is odder still. Be honest. Consider all the people with whom you've tossed back a beer. How many of them would you trust with nuclear launch codes?

Although few people will remember 3 June 1993, it was a landmark in South African history. On that day, after months of negotiations at the World Trade Centre, the multiparty forum voted to set a date for the country’s first national, nonracial, one-person-one-vote election: 27 April 1994. For the first time in South African history, the black majority would go to the polls to elect their own leaders.

Lucy's polls were sometimes kind of violent.

The point is that television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by 'better' such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in executive skill, more knowledgeable about international affairs, more understanding of the interrelations of economic systems, and so on. The reason has, almost entirely, to do with 'image.' But not because politicians are preoccupied with presenting themselves in the best possible light. After all, who isn't? It is a rare and deeply disturbed person who does not wish to project a favorable image. But television gives image a bad name. For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience. And therein lies one of the most powerful influences of the television commercial on political discourse.

Like every thoughtful parent in every age of history, Neil consoled himself, "My generation failed, but this new one is going to change the entire world, and go piously to the polls even on rainy election-days, and never drink more than one cocktail, and end all war.

In the West public opinion is polled just one time: during election time, and then is totally ignored.

Hitler had made it to the chancellery in a brokered deal that conservative elites agreed to only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims. They underestimated his cunning and overestimated his base of support, which had been the very reason they had felt they needed him in the first place. At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent in the country's last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was 'to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy.

At this moment in history the dominant force is clear: we live in an age of pathological short-termism. Politicians can barely see beyond the next election or the latest opinion poll or tweet. Businesses are slaves to the next quarterly report and the constant demand to ratchet up shareholder value.

New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn't make it a smart country. A couple of weeks ago, I was asked on CNN if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn't put anything past this stupid country. Well, the station was flooded with emails, and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad, because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!! Worst of all, Bill O'Reilly refuted my contention that this is a stupid country by calling me a pinhead, which (a) proves my point, and (b) is really funny coming from a doody-face like him. Now, before I go about demonstration how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness that's dragging us down, let me just say that ignorance has life-and-death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, seventy percent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Six years later, thirty-four percent still do. Or look at the health-care debate: At a recent town hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross-country to protest highways. This country is like a college chick after two Long Island iced teas: We can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget the town halls, and replace them with study halls. Listen to some of these stats: A majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. Twenty-four percent could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don't know what's in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don't know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket. Not here. Nearly half of Americans don't know that states have two senators, and more than half can't name their congressman. And among Republican governors, only three got their wife's name right on the first try. People bitch and moan about taxes and spending, but they have no idea what their government spends money on. The average voter thinks foreign aid consumes more twenty-four percent of our budget. It's actually less than one percent. A third of Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen ad a third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence, because it contains the words "Bush" and "knowledge." Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll say eighteen percent of us think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they're not stupid. They're interplanetary mavericks. And I haven't even brought up religion. But here's one fun fact I'll leave you with: Did you know only about half of Americans are aware that Judaism is an older religion than Christianity? That's right, half of America looks at books called the Old Testament and the New Testament and cannot figure out which came first. I rest my case.

After Kushner purchased the property, it continued to be a site of illicit dealings. It was in the Grand Havana Room of 666 Fifth Avenue that convicted felons Paul Manafort and Rick Gates gave Kremlin operative Konstantin Kilimnik US election polling data

During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president—only the second impeachment hearing in American history—you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.

After Obama’s victory, 395 new voting restrictions were introduced in 49 states from 2011 to 2015. Following the Tea Party’s triumph in the 2010 elections, half the states in the country, nearly all of them under Republican control—from Texas to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania—passed laws making it harder to vote. The sudden escalation of efforts to curb voting rights most closely resembled the Redemption period that ended Reconstruction, when every southern state adopted devices like literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise African-American voters.

They worried third-party ballot harvesting would encourage voter fraud. Some states had called for unsupervised drop boxes to replace or supplement ordinary polling stations. What would stop those boxes from being tampered with, or, worse still, from being filled with fraudulent votes by bad actors?

The key idea here is “negative partisanship”: partisan behavior driven not by positive feelings toward the party you support but negative feelings toward the party you oppose. If you’ve ever voted in an election feeling a bit bleh about the candidate you backed, but fearful of the troglodyte or socialist running against her, you’ve been a negative partisan. It turns out a lot of us have been negative partisans. A 2016 Pew poll found that self-described independents who tended to vote for one party or the other were driven more by negative motivations. Majorities of both Republican- and Democratic-leaning independents said a major reason for their lean was the other party’s policies were bad for the country; by contrast, only a third of each group said they were driven by support for the policies of the party they were voting for.

Wait a minute,” Billy said. “What about elections?” “What elections?” I asked. “Its easy for them to rig votes with the electronic ballets. If third world countries used archaic methods of voting, we sent in representatives from the US to ‘oversee them.’ Everybody I knew in politics didn’t give elections a thought. They knew that people would believe in the corrupted, controlled polls, and that those appointed to office in accordance with the New World Order were secure.” “So people are misled by their leaders to believe they chose them?” “Not only that,” I answered, “but figureheads are placed while the real power works behind the scenes. For example, when Salinas was Vice President of Mexico, he ran the country while dela Madrid was only a Presidential figurehead. Vice President Bush ran this country while Reagan was acting President.

On the eve of the 2016 presidential election, only 18 percent of Americans said they trusted national news media, according to the Pew Research Center. In a Gallup poll at about the same time, nearly two-thirds of Americans believed the mainstream press was filled with “fake news.” Contrast this with American opinion almost five decades before. In 1972, in the wake of investigative reporting that revealed truths about Vietnam and Nixon’s Watergate scandal, 72 percent of Americans expressed trust and confidence in the press.

It is astonishing that Donald Trump managed to eke out a victory over Donald Trump at the polls. It is amazing how narrow the margin was by which Hillary Clinton defeated Hillary Clinton.

A Quinnipiac poll in December 2017 showed that 86 percent of Democratic voters believed “the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election.

One of the best ways to get an individual voter out to the polls is through a personal appeal. In this sense, a personal appeal means an appeal to a specific person and not people in general.

When New Yorkers went to the polls a few weeks later, election officials came across the names of two unexpected write-in candidates for state treasurer: John D. Rockefeller and Charles Ponzi.

how the battle, while deeply political, wasn’t fundamentally about campaigns and elections. Long before people went to the polls, our struggle was to reshape the stories that tell us who we are.

On Rachel's show for November 7, 2012: Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. and he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States, again. And the Bureau of Labor statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the congressional research service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not screwed to over-sample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad; Nate Silver was doing math. And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy, sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone's guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And you and election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism. Listen, last night was a good night for liberals and for democrats for very obvious reasons, but it was also, possibly, a good night for this country as a whole. Because in this country, we have a two-party system in government. And the idea is supposed to be that the two sides both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country. They both propose possible solutions to our real problems. And we debate between those possible solutions. And by the process of debate, we pick the best idea. That competition between good ideas from both sides about real problems in the real country should result in our country having better choices, better options, than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff. And if the Republican Party and the conservative movement and the conservative media is stuck in a vacuum-sealed door-locked spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good and denying the factual, lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived as a nation of the constructive debate about competing feasible ideas about real problems. Last night the Republicans got shellacked, and they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them in real time, in real humiliating time, not believe it, even as it was happening to them. And unless they are going to secede, they are going to have to pop the factual bubble they have been so happy living inside if they do not want to get shellacked again, and that will be a painful process for them, but it will be good for the whole country, left, right, and center. You guys, we're counting on you. Wake up. There are real problems in the world. There are real, knowable facts in the world. Let's accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let's move on from there. If the Republican Party and the conservative movement and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation. And in that spirit, congratulations, everyone!

Polls with as much as seventeen-point predicted victories for Biden shaped news coverage for months and hurt morale in the Trump team. Even if they’d learned better than most to not believe polls or other media narratives, the bad headlines were difficult to ignore.

Maybe what stopped people from voting wasn't a lack of information about the candidates or a feeling that the outcomes of races didn't matter or a sense that a trip to the polls was inconvenient. What if voting wasn't only a political act, but a social one that took place in a liminal space between the public and private that had never been well-defined to citizens? What if toying with those expectations was key to turning a person into a voter? What if elections were simply less about shaping people's opinions than changing their behaviors?

He had developed a deep disdain of Donald Trump, whom he considered a con man, but he wasn’t impressed by Joe Biden. “When he was vice president, I went to lunch with him in San Francisco where he droned on for an hour and was boring as hell, like one of those dolls where you pull the string and it just says the same mindless phrases over and over.” Nonetheless, he says he would have voted for Biden in 2020, but he decided that going to the polls in California, where he was then registered, was a waste of time because it was not a contested state.

Fats knew the playbook and was adept at the dirty tricks: stuffing ballot boxes, raising large sums of unreported money, buying blocks of votes, spreading lies, intimidating voters, harassing poll workers, bribing election officials, and voting dead people with absentee ballots.

There were four white cops in the polling place where I went to vote. Right in the middle of Harlem, four white cops. Everybody else there were colored, voters all colored, officials all colored registering the books, only the cops white--to remind me of which color is the law. I went inside that voting booth and shut the door and stood there all by myself and put the biggest black mark I could make in front of every black name on the ballot. At least up North I can vote black. If enough of us votes black in Harlem, maybe someday we can change the color of the law.

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing in The Communist Manifesto, declared: “In bourgeois society . . . the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past.”13 This view is shared by contemporary statists, including the current occupants of the White House. On May 14, 2008, the future First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, while campaigning for her husband, Barack Obama, proclaimed: “We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history. We’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.”14 On October 30, 2008, when the polls showed him the likely winner of the upcoming presidential election, Barack Obama shouted during a campaign stop days before the vote: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”15

A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against their will, instead of by fraud and against the will of all the rest of us, as now... ...that the names of all the men eligible in each assembly district be put into a hat (or, if no hat can be found that is large enough, into a bathtub), and that a blind moron, preferably of tender years, be delegated to draw out one... The advantages that this system would offer are so vast and obvious that I hesitate to venture into the banality of rehearsing them. It would in the first place, save the commonwealth the present excessive cost of elections, and make political campaigns unnecessary. It would in the second place, get rid of all the heart-burnings that now flow out of every contest at the polls, and block the reprisals and charges of fraud that now issue from the heart-burnings. It would, in the third place, fill all the State Legislatures with men of a peculiar and unprecedented cast of mind – men actually convinced that public service is a public burden, and not merely a private snap. And it would, in the fourth and most important place, completely dispose of the present degrading knee-bending and trading in votes, for nine-tenths of the legislators, having got into office unwillingly, would be eager only to finish their duties and go home, and even those who acquired a taste for the life would be unable to increase the probability, even by one chance in a million, of their reelection. The disadvantages of the plan are very few, and most of them, I believe, yield readily to analysis. Do I hear argument that a miscellaneous gang of tin-roofers, delicatessen dealers and retired bookkeepers, chosen by hazard, would lack the vast knowledge of public affairs needed by makers of laws? Then I can only answer (a) that no such knowledge is actually necessary, and (b) that few, if any, of the existing legislators possess it... Would that be a disservice to the state? Certainly not. On the contrary, it would be a service of the first magnitude, for the worst curse of democracy, as we suffer under it today, is that it makes public office a monopoly of a palpably inferior and ignoble group of men. They have to abase themselves to get it, and they have to keep on abasing themselves in order to hold it. The fact reflects in their general character, which is obviously low. They are men congenitally capable of cringing and dishonorable acts, else they would not have got into public life at all. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule among them, but how many? What I contend is simply that the number of such exceptions is bound to be smaller in the class of professional job-seekers than it is in any other class, or in the population in general. What I contend, second, is that choosing legislators from that populations, by chance, would reduce immensely the proportion of such slimy men in the halls of legislation, and that the effects would be instantly visible in a great improvement in the justice and reasonableness of the laws.

People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it.” To explain this peculiar phenomenon, Jost’s team developed a theory of system justification. Its core idea is that people are motivated to rationalize the status quo as legitimate—even if it goes directly against their interests. In one study, they tracked Democratic and Republican voters before the 2000 U.S. presidential election. When George W. Bush gained in the polls, Republicans rated him as more desirable, but so did Democrats, who were already preparing justifications for the anticipated status quo. The same happened when Al Gore’s likelihood of success increased: Both Republicans and Democrats judged him more favorably. Regardless of political ideologies, when a candidate seemed destined to win, people liked him more. When his odds dropped, they liked him less. Justifying the default system serves a soothing function. It’s an emotional painkiller: If the world is supposed to be this way, we don’t need to be dissatisfied with it. But acquiescence also robs us of the moral outrage to stand against injustice and the creative will to consider alternative ways that the world could work.

Richard Nixon won in forty-nine states by, for one thing, appealing to the inherent racism of the American people. Voters saw him—a Harris poll two months after the election showed this plainly—as the candidate who would put a stop to school busing and the encroachment of blacks and other minorities on white jobs

ballot you go, the more volatile the polls tend to be: polls of House races are less accurate than polls of Senate races, which are in turn less accurate than polls of presidential races. Polls of primaries, also, are considerably less accurate than general election polls. During the 2008 Democratic primaries, the average poll missed by about eight points, far more than implied by its margin of error. The problems in polls of the Republican primaries of 2012 may have been even worse.26 In many of the major states, in fact—including Iowa, South Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Washington, Colorado, Ohio, Alabama, and Mississippi—the candidate ahead in the polls a week before the election lost.

After nine days of turmoil—nine days in which millions of Americans went to the polls to vote early—and just thirty-six hours before Election Day, Comey sent another letter announcing that the “new” batch of emails wasn’t really new and contained nothing to cause him to alter his months-old decision not to seek charges. Well, great. Too little, too

Remember one thing as South Africa prepares to go to the polls this week and the world grapples with the ascendancy of the African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma: South Africa is not Zimbabwe. In South Africa, no one doubts that Wednesday's elections will be free and fair. While there is an unacceptable degree of government corruption, there is no evidence of the wholesale kleptocracy of Robert Mugabe's elite. While there has been the abuse of the organs of state by the ruling ANC, there is not the state terror of Mugabe's Zanu-PF. And while there is a clear left bias to Zuma's ANC, there is no suggestion of the kind of voluntarist experimentation that has brought Zimbabwe to its knees.

At least one pollster agrees with Trump. After the 2020 election, pollster Jim Lee of Susquehanna Polling & Research blasted the politicization of his industry and issued a statement noting that a slew of inaccurate polling results that almost universally overstated Biden’s support left pollsters “vulnerable to criticisms of contributing to voter suppression.

Mostly, this was the fault of white, Rust Belt, out-of-work Democrats. They had voted twice for Barack Obama, but now they were being told that they were racists or white supremacists for voting for Trump and giving him an Electoral College edge. The contrarian liberal genius Michael Moore had been a lonely prophet who had seen it coming, but the Clinton team had ignored him, just as they had ignored their own patriarch, Bill Clinton, who sounded the same warning. In a live performance, Moore had teased voters in Wilmington, Ohio, months before the election, telling them that he knew what they were planning to do. And they laughed with him, like guilty children caught in the act by a bemused cousin. He knew they were going to vote for Trump. He didn’t like it, but at least he was one person who could not be fooled. People who had been overlooked, despised, stomped on, used, taken for granted. This was their moment to speak. They had been shamed into telling the pollsters what they wanted to hear, but in the privacy of their polling booths, they had struck a blow. This

Polls are one of the most dishonest things,” President Trump said, reflecting on the matter later from his Mar-a-Lago home. “I have never seen dishonesty like this. They’re dishonest with polls. You know it’s suppression to keep people home. Do you know how many people didn’t vote because of that poll and Wisconsin? And probably other places too, that poll got so much publicity.

The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen. Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election. [from interview with Chris Hedges in 2010]

...is there any body of citizens in the country who actually welcome and enjoy a General Election?..YES. Those citizens are schoolchildren...attending national schools. It may be very cynical, but on the appointed day those Lyceums of lower learning are turned into polling stations, the homes of innocence temporarily become part of the grim apparatus of politics and the scheming of sundry chancers.

the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country’s last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was “to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy.” By the time they recognized their fatal miscalculation, it was too late. Hitler had risen as an outside agitator, a cult figure enamored of pageantry and rallies with parades of people carrying torches that an observer said looked like “rivers of fire.” Hitler saw himself as the voice of the Volk, of their grievances and fears, especially those in the rural districts, as a god-chosen savior, running on instinct. He had never held elected office before.

The AWU had polled its own members and he knew the men and women of the union overwhelmingly supported Howard blocking the Tampa. That election proved a life lesson for Shorten: he saw the power of wedge politics. At the Press Club a few months later, he called on unions to act as a conservative check on the rank and file. Unions represent 2 million workers and who, he asked, do Labor’s branches represent?

Arizona state law permits mail-in votes to be counted up to two weeks prior to Election Day. Those votes, which leaned Democratic, were some of the first to be posted when the polls closed. The state has a reputation for counting accurately and running elections cleanly, but it’s inordinately slow. It took the counters in Arizona days to count their ballots, which meant that the Election Day results that were posted were largely based on absentee ballots.

The same thing happened after Donald Trump won the presidency. There was a huge outcry about the polls being wrong. Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight.com, drew a lot of that criticism. But he never said Clinton was a sure thing. Based on his aggregation and weighting of polling data, he had Trump between 30% and 40% to win (approximately between two-to-one and three-to-two against) in the week before the election. An event predicted to happen 30% to 40% of the time will happen a lot.

1934 it became apparent that the Germans were swiftly rearming, the leader of the British Labour Party vowed “to close every recruiting station, disband the Army and disarm the Air Force,” and he got his candidate elected by saying so.7 The Peace Ballot, a national survey of public opinion, was distributed throughout Great Britain in 1935 and a majority of those polled stated that while they supported collective national security, they did so only “by all means short of war.” At a time when Hitler was

He told the House that he would not call an election in the immediate aftermath of victory. ‘At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man,’ Churchill said, ‘walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper – no amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of that point.’138 He had now decided against an early poll to exploit what he had described to Eden as ‘the glamour’ of victory.

A Politico article in November 2020 claimed that Biden’s eventual win in Georgia was related to Democrats’ massive efforts to fight so-called “voter suppression tactics,” the left’s terminology for ensuring that election fraud is limited by removing ineligible voters from polling books, having voters submit identification, and limiting the participation of outside parties in the secret voting process.56 Democrats did invest in the project, spending tens of millions of dollars to challenge and change voter integrity laws.

Within days, Trump admitted that on July 25 he had called the new president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to enlist his help against former vice president Joe Biden, who was beating Trump in most polls going into the 2020 election season. Zelensky was desperate for the money Congress had approved to help his country fight Russian-backed separatists in the regions Russia had occupied after the 2014 invasion, but Trump indicated he would release the money only after Zelensky announced an investigation into the actions of Biden’s son Hunter during his time on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Without such a majority how could the Republic survive? This was a question which on the morrow of the 1930 elections became of increased interest to two pillars of the nation whose leaders had never really accepted the Republic except as a passing misfortune in German history: the Army and the world of the big industrialists and financiers. Flushed by his success at the polls, Hitler now turned his attention toward winning over these two powerful groups. Long ago in Vienna, as we have seen, he had learned from the tactics of Mayor Karl Lueger the importance of bringing “powerful existing institutions” over to one’s side.

We have been weathering this hurricane wall of doubt and violence for so long, and now, more crystalline than ever, we have an enemy and a mandate. We have the smirking apotheosis of our oppression sliming, paw-first, toward our genitals. We have the popular vote. We have proof, in exit polls, that white women will pawn their humanity for the safety of white supremacy. We have abortion pills to stockpile and neighbors to protect and children to teach. We have the right woman to find. We have local elections in a year. The fact that we lost doesn’t make us wrong; the fact that they don’t believe in us doesn’t make us disappear. Progress

the feeling that they are. Psychologists have a name for our tendency to confuse our own perspective with something more universal: it’s called “naive realism,” the sense that we are seeing reality as it truly is, without filters or errors.9 Naive realism can lead us badly astray when we confuse our personal perspective on the world with some universal truth. We are surprised when an election goes against us: Everyone in our social circle agreed with us, so why did the nation vote otherwise? Opinion polls don’t always get it right, but I can assure you they have a better track record of predicting elections than simply talking to your friends.

In times of crisis you either deepen democracy, or you go to the other extreme and become totalitarian. Our struggles for democracy have taught us some important and valuable lessons. Over a million citizen activists of all ethnic groups, mostly young people, made history by going door to door, urging voters to go to the polls and send Barack Obama to the White House in 2008. We did this because we believed and hoped that this charismatic black man could bring about the transformational changes we urgently need at this time on the clock of the world, when the U.S. empire is unraveling and the American pursuit of unlimited economic growth has reached its social and ecological limits. We have since witnessed the election of our first black president stir increasingly dangerous counterrevolutionary resentments in a white middle class uncertain of its future in a country that is losing two wars and eliminating well-paying union jobs. We have watched our elected officials in DC bail out the banks while wheeling and dealing with insurance company lobbyists to deliver a contorted version of health care reform. We have been stunned by the audacity of the Supreme Court as it reaffirmed the premise that corporations are persons and validated corporate financing of elections in its Citizens United decision.

One of the problems of a society as tightly controlled as ours is that we get so little information about what those of our fellow citizens whom we will never know or see are actually thinking and feeling. This seems a paradox when most politics today involves minute-by-minute poll taking on what looks to be every conceivable subject, but, as politicians and pollsters know, it’s how the question is asked that determines the response. Also, there are vast areas, like rural America, that are an unmapped ultima Thule to those who own the corporations that own the media that spend billions of dollars to take polls in order to elect their lawyers to high office. Ruby

For weeks all opinion polls and all responsible commentators had been predicting that there was no hope of the Labour Party being elected on a programme like this. Ever since Harry Perkins had been chosen to lead Labour at a tumultuous party conference two years earlier, the popular press had been saying that this proved what they had always argued – namely that the Labour Party was in the grip of a Marxist conspiracy. Privately the rulers of the great corporations had been gleeful, for they had convinced themselves that the British people were basically moderate and that, however rough the going got, they would never elect a Labour government headed by the likes of Harry Perkins.

...Subordination of the state to Christian values is precisely what the early Puritans, even those in the tradition of the Mayflower Pilgrims, aimed to do. The First Amendment notwithstanding, large numbers of the American public (especially churchgoing Protestant Christians) have embodied this Puritan way of thinking, viewing America as a "Christan nation." Relatively recent poll data bear out the enduring character of these Puritan convictions. According to a Pew Forum poll held just prior to the 2004 election, over one-half of the public would have reservations voting for a candidate with no religious affiliation (31 percent refusing to vote for a Muslim and 15 percent for a Catholic).

Reconstruction prompted a vicious white backlash, which gained traction following the disputed election of 1876, when the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes pulled federal troops out of the South in return for the electoral votes of Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Segregationist whites, known as Redeemers, regained power and quickly targeted black voters, first through violence and fraud and then via devices like literacy and good character tests, poll taxes, and stringent residency requirements. Mississippi became the first state to change its constitution to disenfranchise black voters in 1890. Every other southern state quickly followed. Black voters disappeared seemingly overnight.

Hitler had made it to the chancellery in a brokered deal that conservative elites agreed to only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims. They underestimated his cunning and overestimated his base of support, which had been the very reason they had felt they needed him in the first place. At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country’s last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was “to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy.

How are we going to bring about these transformations? Politics as usual—debate and argument, even voting—are no longer sufficient. Our system of representative democracy, created by a great revolution, must now itself become the target of revolutionary change. For too many years counting, vast numbers of people stopped going to the polls, either because they did not care what happened to the country or the world or because they did not believe that voting would make a difference on the profound and interconnected issues that really matter. Now, with a surge of new political interest having give rise to the Obama presidency, we need to inject new meaning into the concept of the “will of the people.” The will of too many Americans has been to pursue private happiness and take as little responsibility as possible for governing our country. As a result, we have left the job of governing to our elected representatives, even though we know that they serve corporate interests and therefore make decisions that threaten our biosphere and widen the gulf between the rich and poor both in our country and throughout the world. In other words, even though it is readily apparent that our lifestyle choices and the decisions of our representatives are increasing social injustice and endangering our planet, too many of us have wanted to continue going our merry and not-so-merry ways, periodically voting politicians in and out of office but leaving the responsibility for policy decisions to them. Our will has been to act like consumers, not like responsible citizens. Historians may one day look back at the 2000 election, marked by the Supreme Court’s decision to award the presidency to George W. Bush, as a decisive turning point in the death of representative democracy in the United States. National Public Radio analyst Daniel Schorr called it “a junta.” Jack Lessenberry, columnist for the MetroTimes in Detroit, called it “a right-wing judicial coup.” Although more restrained, the language of dissenting justices Breyer, Ginsberg, Souter, and Stevens was equally clear. They said that there was no legal or moral justification for deciding the presidency in this way.3 That’s why Al Gore didn’t speak for me in his concession speech. You don’t just “strongly disagree” with a right-wing coup or a junta. You expose it as illegal, immoral, and illegitimate, and you start building a movement to challenge and change the system that created it. The crisis brought on by the fraud of 2000 and aggravated by the Bush administration’s constant and callous disregard for the Constitution exposed so many defects that we now have an unprecedented opportunity not only to improve voting procedures but to turn U.S. democracy into “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” instead of government of, by, and for corporate power.

Democracy is a proposal (rarely realized) about decision making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision-makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. Democracy should not be confused with the ‘freedom’ of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretences. Today the fundamental decisions, which effect the unnecessary pain increasingly suffered across the planet, have been and are taken unilaterally without any open consultation or participation. Both

Republicans are far more likely to walk in to a polling boot than democrats and democrats are far more likely to use mail-in ballots. So what could very well happen on in election night, you’re sitting there moderating show, it appears that Trump is winning in Michigan and Wisconsin and Florida. People say it, oh my goodness trump is ahead and then in ten a clock in a night Trump announces, “I won the election and by the way my attorney general has told me there is massive fraud with the mail in ballots, and we got a stop counting those ballots. Thank you America , I won, have a good night!” And then the mail in-ballots keep coming in and Trumps lead disappears and Biden becomes the leader. And then you have a massive chaos and conspiracy theory and that is the nightmare I’m worried about.

week before the election, the New Republic’s Morton Kondracke wrote that “it seems more likely by the day that Ronald Reagan is not going to execute a massive electoral sweep. In fact, the movement of the presidential campaign suggests a Carter victory.”14 David Broder had written: “There is no evidence of a dramatic upsurge in Republican strength or a massive turnover in Congress.” Though polls in the days leading up to the election showed Reagan ahead of Carter, most were near or within the margin of error, and everyone was predicting a late-night nail-biter. The New York Times poll three days out had Reagan ahead by a single point; veteran California pollster Mervin Field said, “At the moment there is a slight movement toward Carter.” George Gallup said, “This election could very well be a cliffhanger just like 1948.”15

Trump doesn’t happen in a country where things are going well. People give in to their baser instincts when they lose faith in the future. The pessimism and anger necessary for this situation has been building for a generation, and not all on one side. A significant number of Trump voters voted for Obama eight years ago. A lot of those were in rust-belt states that proved critical to his election. What happened there? Trump also polled 2–1 among veterans, despite his own horrific record of deferments and his insulting of every vet from John McCain to Humayun Khan. Was it possible that his rhetoric about ending “our current policy of regime change” resonated with recently returned vets? The data said yes. It may not have been decisive, but it likely was one of many factors. It was also common sense, because this was one of his main themes on the campaign trail—Trump clearly smelled those veteran votes. The Trump phenomenon was also about a political and media taboo: class. When the liberal arts grads who mostly populate the media think about class, we tend to think in terms of the heroic worker, or whatever Marx-inspired cliché they taught us in college. Because of this, most pundits scoff at class, because when they look at Trump crowds, they don’t see Norma Rae or Matewan. Instead, they see Married with Children, a bunch of tacky mall-goers who gobble up crap movies and, incidentally, hate the noble political press. Our take on Trump voters was closer to Orwell than Marx: “In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much.” Beyond the utility that calling everything racism had for both party establishments, it was good for that other sector, the news media.

Public opinion polls have long proved there is majority support for pretty much every issue that the women’s movement has brought up, but those of us, women or men, who identify with feminism are still made to feel isolated, wrong, out of step. At first, feminists were assumed to be only discontented suburban housewives; then a small bunch of women’s libbers, “bra burners,”3 and radicals; then women on welfare; then briefcase-carrying imitations of male executives; then unfulfilled women who forgot to have children; then women voters responsible for a gender gap that really could decide elections. That last was too dangerous, so suddenly we were told we were in a “postfeminist” age, so we would relax, stop, quit. Indeed, the common purpose in all these disparate and contradictory descriptions is to slow and stop a challenge to the current hierarchy.

The potential for manipulation here is enormous. Here’s one example. During the 2012 election, Facebook users had the opportunity to post an “I Voted” icon, much like the real stickers many of us get at polling places after voting. There is a documented bandwagon effect with respect to voting; you are more likely to vote if you believe your friends are voting, too. This manipulation had the effect of increasing voter turnout 0.4% nationwide. So far, so good. But now imagine if Facebook manipulated the visibility of the “I Voted” icon on the basis of either party affiliation or some decent proxy of it: ZIP code of residence, blogs linked to, URLs liked, and so on. It didn’t, but if it had, it would have had the effect of increasing voter turnout in one direction. It would be hard to detect, and it wouldn’t even be illegal. Facebook could easily tilt a close election by selectively manipulating what posts its users see. Google might do something similar with its search results.

Hitler had made it to the chancellery in a brokered deal that conservative elites agreed to only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims. They underestimated his cunning and overestimated his base of support, which had been the very reason they had felt they needed him in the first place. At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country’s last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was “to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy.” By the time they recognized their fatal miscalculation, it was too late. Hitler had risen as an outside agitator, a cult figure enamored of pageantry and rallies with parades of people carrying torches that an observer said looked like “rivers of fire.” Hitler saw himself as the voice of the Volk, of their grievances and fears, especially those in the rural districts, as a god-chosen savior, running on instinct. He had never held elected office before.

Most presidents would instantly draw a sharp, clean line between campaign operations and the use of military force. This is the proverbial “wag the dog” scenario where a president in trouble seeks to bomb his way out of it by hitting a target overseas. With no adult supervision in the Pentagon—just who is the acting, provisional, temporary, staffing-agency, drop-in SECDEF this week?—no one should put it past Trump to escalate conflicts with China, Iran, or elsewhere when some part of his lizard brain tells him that some boom-boom will goose his polling numbers. Some of my former GOP colleagues will whisper, “How dare you accuse the American president of ever using the military for…” and then drop the subject, because no matter how deep they are in the Trump hole, they know who this man is and what he’ll do. Trump proves time and again that morals, laws, norms, traditions, rules, guidelines, recommendations, and tearful pleading from his staff mean nothing when he gets a power boner and decides he’s going to do something stupid. President Hold My Beer comes from the Modern Unitary Executive Power theory, where there are no limits, no laws, and no right and wrong. I’m not saying it’s a matter of if Trump will wag the dog in 2020. I’m saying that anyone who thinks he wouldn’t is a damn fool.

the device had the property of transresistance and should have a name similar to devices such as the thermistor and varistor, Pierce proposed transistor. Exclaimed Brattain, “That’s it!” The naming process still had to go through a formal poll of all the other engineers, but transistor easily won the election over five other options.35 On June 30, 1948, the press gathered in the auditorium of Bell Labs’ old building on West Street in Manhattan. The event featured Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain as a group, and it was moderated by the director of research, Ralph Bown, dressed in a somber suit and colorful bow tie. He emphasized that the invention sprang from a combination of collaborative teamwork and individual brilliance: “Scientific research is coming more and more to be recognized as a group or teamwork job. . . . What we have for you today represents a fine example of teamwork, of brilliant individual contributions, and of the value of basic research in an industrial framework.”36 That precisely described the mix that had become the formula for innovation in the digital age. The New York Times buried the story on page 46 as the last item in its “News of Radio” column, after a note about an upcoming broadcast of an organ concert. But Time made it the lead story of its science section, with the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Bell Labs enforced the rule that Shockley be in every publicity photo along with Bardeen and Brattain. The most famous one shows the three of them in Brattain’s lab. Just as it was about to be taken, Shockley sat down in Brattain’s chair, as if it were his desk and microscope, and became the focal point of the photo. Years later Bardeen would describe Brattain’s lingering dismay and his resentment of Shockley: “Boy, Walter hates this picture. . . . That’s Walter’s equipment and our experiment,

ON THE MODUS OPERANDI OF OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT, DONALD J. TRUMP "According to a new ABC/Washington Post poll, President Trump’s disapproval rating has hit a new high." The President's response to this news was "“I don’t do it for the polls. Honestly — people won’t necessarily agree with this — I do nothing for the polls,” the president told reporters on Wednesday. “I do it to do what’s right. I’m here for an extended period of time. I’m here for a period that’s a very important period of time. And we are straightening out this country.” - Both Quotes Taken From Aol News - August 31, 2018 In The United States, as in other Republics, the two main categories of Presidential motivation for their assigned tasks are #1: Self Interest in seeking to attain and to hold on to political power for their own sakes, regarding the welfare of This Republic to be of secondary importance. #2: Seeking to attain and to hold on to the power of that same office for the selfless sake of this Republic's welfare, irregardless of their personal interest, and in the best of cases going against their personal interests to do what is best for this Republic even if it means making profound and extreme personal sacrifices. Abraham Lincoln understood this last mentioned motivation and gave his life for it. The primary information any political scientist needs to ascertain regarding the diagnosis of a particular President's modus operandi is to first take an insightful and detailed look at the individual's past. The litmus test always being what would he or she be willing to sacrifice for the Nation. In the case of our current President, Donald John Trump, he abandoned a life of liberal luxury linked to self imposed limited responsibilities for an intensely grueling, veritably non stop two year nightmare of criss crossing this immense Country's varied terrain, both literally and socially when he could have easily maintained his life of liberal leisure. While my assertion that his personal choice was, in my view, sacrificially done for the sake of a great power in a state of rapid decline can be contradicted by saying it was motivated by selfish reasons, all evidence points to the contrary. For knowing the human condition, fraught with a plentitude of weaknesses, for a man in the end portion of his lifetime to sacrifice an easy life for a hard working incessant schedule of thankless tasks it is entirely doubtful that this choice was made devoid of a special and even exalted inspiration to do so. And while the right motivations are pivotal to a President's success, what is also obviously needed are generic and specific political, military and ministerial skills which must be naturally endowed by Our Creator upon the particular President elected for the purposes of advancing a Nation's general well being for one and all. If one looks at the latest National statistics since President Trump took office, (such as our rising GNP, the booming market, the dramatically shrinking unemployment rate, and the overall positive emotive strains in regards to our Nation's future, on both the left and the right) one can make definitive objective conclusions pertaining to the exceptionally noble character and efficiency of the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And if one can drown out the constant communicative assaults on our current Commander In Chief, and especially if one can honestly assess the remarkable lack of substantial mistakes made by the current President, all of these factors point to a leader who is impressively strong, morally and in other imperative ways. And at the most propitious time. For the main reason that so many people in our Republic palpably despise our current President is that his political and especially his social agenda directly threatens their licentious way of life. - John Lars Zwerenz

FACING A TOUGH election, I also saw that the P5+1 and Iran were racing to a dangerous nuclear agreement that would pave Iran’s path to the bomb. Under the impending agreement, Iran would be able to freely enrich uranium within a few years. Becoming a threshold nuclear power with a nuclear arsenal, Iran would jeopardize the very existence of Israel. I had to fight this. But how could I possibly do it? The polls showed I could soon be out of office. On Friday, January 8, 2015, I received a fateful call from Ron Dermer from our embassy in Washington. He told me that Speaker of the House John Boehner had called him asking whether I would be willing to address a joint meeting of Congress on the dangers of the impending nuclear deal. It was a monumental decision. This would not just be another speech. I would be going into the lion’s den in Washington to challenge a sitting American president. Stirring up such a hornets’ nest on the eve of an Israeli election could have devastating political consequences. The nuclear deal was Obama’s top priority. Blocking it was my top priority. Placing this conflict on such a global stage would put me on a head-on collision course with the president of the United States. Yet I was given the opportunity to speak before Congress and the American people on a matter vital to Israel’s very survival. I felt the pull of history. Such an invitation could not be declined. “The answer is yes, in principle,” I said to Ron. That still left me time to think everything through. Dermer began working on the details with Boehner. We settled on March 3 as the date of the speech, to coincide with AIPAC’s annual conference. I would have six weeks to prepare the most important speech of my life. Word spread that I would be giving the speech just a few days after we picked the date, and a chorus of condemnation erupted like a volcano. Statements like “Netanyahu is destroying our alliance with the United States” and “an act of enormous irresponsibility” flooded the press, the media, and the Knesset. In the US, Dermer personally met with dozens of Democratic

Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union Army. So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it? The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news. (It's later competitor, the United Press, which would be founded on the U.S. Post Office's new telegraph lines, did not yet exist.) The Associated Press took advantage of its economies of scale to produce millions of lines of copy a year and, apart from local news, its product was the mainstay of many American newspapers. With the common law notion of "common carriage" deemed inapplicable, and the latter day concept of "net neutrality" not yet imagined, Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively. Working closely with the Republican Party and avowedly Republican papers like The New York Times (the ideal of an unbiased press would not be established for some time, and the minting of the Time's liberal bona fides would take longer still), they did what they could to throw the election to Hayes. It was easy: the AP ran story after story about what an honest man Hayes was, what a good governor he had been, or just whatever he happened to be doing that day. It omitted any scandals related to Hayes, and it declined to run positive stories about his rivals (James Blaine in the primary, Samuel Tilden in the general). But beyond routine favoritism, late that Election Day Western Union offered the Hayes campaign a secret weapon that would come to light only much later. Hayes, far from being the front-runner, had gained the Republican nomination only on the seventh ballot. But as the polls closed his persistence appeared a waste of time, for Tilden, the Democrat, held a clear advantage in the popular vote (by a margin of over 250,000) and seemed headed for victory according to most early returns; by some accounts Hayes privately conceded defeat. But late that night, Reid, the New York Times editor, alerted the Republican Party that the Democrats, despite extensive intimidation of Republican supporters, remained unsure of their victory in the South. The GOP sent some telegrams of its own to the Republican governors in the South with special instructions for manipulating state electoral commissions. As a result the Hayes campaign abruptly claimed victory, resulting in an electoral dispute that would make Bush v. Gore seem a garden party. After a few brutal months, the Democrats relented, allowing Hayes the presidency — in exchange, most historians believe, for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. The full history of the 1876 election is complex, and the power of th

Thus, the PTI fared relatively well in a number of constituencies that until now were considered impregnable fiefdoms of the MQM. This was the case, for instance, of NA-245 (National Assembly constituency covering North Nazimabad), where it registered 54,937 votes against 115,776 for the MQM. This was also the case—and even more remarkably, considering that this is the ‘home’ constituency of the MQM—in NA-246 (Azizabad), where Amir Sharjeel registered 31,875 votes against Nabeel Gabol (who won with 137,874 votes). If the PTI won the same number of seats as the PPP (one National Assembly seat and three Provincial Assembly seats) in 2013, it registered more than twice its number of votes in the National Assembly election and 230,000 more votes in the Provincial Assembly election. The MQM has reasons to worry: not only did the PTI become Karachi’s second party in terms of vote share (and a party which, adding insult to injury, garnered a significant number of votes from MQM traditional constituencies, unlike the PPP), but its candidates polled in second position in twenty-two provincial constituencies (out of forty-two) and fifteen (out of twenty) national constituencies.

It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls. But I don’t know.

A poll taken prior to the 2012 presidential election found that 71 percent of Mexicans believed that fraud could be in play.

After only eight months in office, Meadows made national headlines by sending an open letter to the Republican leaders of the House demanding they use the “power of the purse” to kill the Affordable Care Act. By then, the law had been upheld by the Supreme Court and affirmed when voters reelected Obama in 2012. But Meadows argued that Republicans should sabotage it by refusing to appropriate any funds for its implementation. And, if they didn’t get their way, they would shut down the government. By fall, Meadows had succeeded in getting more than seventy-nine Republican congressmen to sign on to this plan, forcing Speaker of the House John Boehner, who had opposed the radical measure, to accede to their demands. Meadows later blamed the media for exaggerating his role, but he was hailed by his local Tea Party group as “our poster boy” and by CNN as the “architect” of the 2013 shutdown. The fanfare grew less positive when the radicals in Congress refused to back down, bringing virtually the entire federal government to a halt for sixteen days in October, leaving the country struggling to function without all but the most vital federal services. In Meadows’s district, day-care centers that were reliant on federal aid reportedly turned distraught families away, and nearby national parks were closed, bringing the tourist trade to a sputtering standstill. National polls showed public opinion was overwhelmingly against the shutdown. Even the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, a conservative, called the renegades “the Suicide Caucus.” But the gerrymandering of 2010 had created what Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker called a “historical oddity.” Political extremists now had no incentive to compromise, even with their own party’s leadership. To the contrary, the only threats faced by Republican members from the new, ultraconservative districts were primary challenges from even more conservative candidates. Statistics showed that the eighty members of the so-called Suicide Caucus were a strikingly unrepresentative minority. They represented only 18 percent of the country’s population and just a third of the overall Republican caucus in the House. Gerrymandering had made their districts far less ethnically diverse and further to the right than the country as a whole. They were anomalies, yet because of radicalization of the party’s donor base they wielded disproportionate power. “In previous eras,” Lizza noted, “ideologically extreme minorities could be controlled by party leadership. What’s new about the current House of Representatives is that party discipline has broken down on the Republican side.” Party bosses no longer ruled. Big outside money had failed to buy the 2012 presidential election, but it had nonetheless succeeded in paralyzing the U.S. government. Meadows of course was not able to engineer the government shutdown by himself. Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, whose 2012 victory had also been fueled by right-wing outside money, orchestrated much of the congressional strategy.

The president fundamentally wants to be liked” was Katie Walsh’s analysis. “He just fundamentally needs to be liked so badly that it’s always … everything is a struggle for him.” This translated into a constant need to win something—anything. Equally important, it was essential that he look like a winner. Of course, trying to win without consideration, plan, or clear goals had, in the course of the administration’s first nine months, resulted in almost nothing but losses. At the same time, confounding all political logic, that lack of a plan, that impulsivity, that apparent joie de guerre, had helped create the disruptiveness that seemed to so joyously shatter the status quo for so many. But now, Bannon thought, that novelty was finally wearing off. For Bannon, the Strange-Moore race had been a test of the Trump cult of personality. Certainly Trump continued to believe that people were following him, that he was the movement—and that his support was worth 8 to 10 points in any race. Bannon had decided to test this thesis and to do it as dramatically as possible. All told, the Senate Republican leadership and others spent $ 32 million on Strange’s campaign, while Moore’s campaign spent $ 2 million. Trump, though aware of Strange’s deep polling deficit, had agreed to extend his support in a personal trip. But his appearance in Huntsville, Alabama, on September 22, before a Trump-size crowd, was a political flatliner. It was a full-on Trump speech, ninety minutes of rambling and improvisation—the wall would be built (now it was a see-through wall), Russian interference in the U.S. election was a hoax, he would fire anybody on his cabinet who supported Moore. But, while his base turned out en masse, still drawn to Trump the novelty, his cheerleading for Luther Strange drew at best a muted response. As the crowd became restless, the event threatened to become a hopeless embarrassment. Reading his audience and desperate to find a way out, Trump suddenly threw out a line about Colin Kaepernick taking to his knee while the national anthem played at a National Football League game. The line got a standing ovation. The president thereupon promptly abandoned Luther Strange for the rest of the speech. Likewise, for the next week he continued to whip the NFL. Pay no attention to Strange’s resounding defeat five days after the event in Huntsville. Ignore the size and scale of Trump’s rejection and the Moore-Bannon triumph, with its hint of new disruptions to come. Now Trump had a new topic, and a winning one: the Knee.

Democracy is a proposal (rarely realized) about decision making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision-makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. Democracy should not be confused with the ‘freedom' of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretences.

The more I have studied, the more I have learned that Google has lots of information that is missed by the polls that can be helpful in understanding—among many, many other subjects—an election.

India needs a progressive leader to represent her locally as well as internationally.She needs a dignified ,vociferous statesman , to represent her, talk for her, talk about her, talk to her and bring out the best out of her. I support a progressive, hate-free government for the future of my country. Every human deserves due respect and honour for being all that he or she is, however it cannot be denied an ounce of learning (with all humility) certainly aids in building a strong nation in every aspect. For eons India is known for her ideals, her diversity , and that she cherishes freedom and equality. Now any one who she calls her leader cannot be allowed to puncture the constitutional fabric and infringe on the privileges she has enjoyed for years ,especially after independence. Fellow citizens need to rise from sleep, that apathetic stupor, to realisation of the danger that she was plunged into in the recent past ,and the imminent danger posed to the constitutional fabric, the economy of India, and the image of India. India needs to rise above the constant bickering within her walls, as the wise saying goes, a house divided within herself cannot stand. The torch of peace that we light within our walls will help us glow and light the world.

As I’ve said, there are left-wing believers in nonexistent conspiracies and other fantasies, but they’re not nearly as numerous or influential. During the 2016 Democratic primaries, after Bernie Sanders did better in some election-day exit polls than he did in the voting, some of his supporters were convinced a conspiracy had falsified the results. (In fact, exit polls always tend to oversample younger voters.) And while you might have considered Sanders’s leftism unrealistic or its campaign rhetoric hyperbolic (“the business model of Wall Street is fraud”), the campaign wasn’t based on outright fantasies. You may not want democratic socialism, but Denmark is a real country.

FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS, people from every corner of the planet have flocked to New York City for the reason Frank Sinatra immortalized: to prove they could “make it.” The allure, the prestige, the struggle to survive, breeds a brand, an image of the city that ripples out to the rest of the world. Sinatra sang about proving himself to himself. “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” New York was the yardstick. New York has indeed become a global yardstick—for artists, businesspeople, and dreamers of all stripes. He was a lawyer in New York? He must be good. Doesn’t matter if he was the worst lawyer in the city. If you can make it in New York, people assume that you can make it anywhere. The yardstick the public uses when judging a presidential candidate, it turns out, is not how much time the candidate has in politics. “It’s leadership qualities,” explains the presidential historian Doug Wead, a former adviser to George H. W. Bush and the author of 30 books on the presidents. Indeed, polls indicate that being “a strong and decisive leader” is the number one characteristic a presidential candidate can have. The fastest-climbing presidents, it turns out, used the Sinatra Principle to convey their leadership cred. What shows leadership like commanding an army (Washington), running a university (Wilson), governing a state for a few years—even if you started out as an actor (Reagan)—or building a new political party and having the humility to put aside your own interests for the good of the whole (Lincoln)? Dwight D. Eisenhower led the United States and its allies to victory against Hitler. He had never held an elected office. He won by a landslide with five times the electoral votes of his rival. “If he can make it there, he can make it anywhere,” US voters decided.

Like many others, I was surprised when Donald Trump was elected president. I had assumed from media polling that Hillary Clinton was going to win. I have asked myself many times since if I was influenced by that assumption. I don’t know. Certainly not consciously, but I would be a fool to say it couldn’t have had an impact on me. It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls.

democracy should be a nation in which all people, regardless of their income, can participate in the political process, and can run for office without begging for contributions from the wealthy. Our vision for the future of this country should be one in which candidates are not telling billionaires at special forums what they can do for them in exchange for large contributions. Our vision for democracy should be one in which candidates are speaking to the vast majority of our people—working people, the middle class, low-income people, the elderly, the children, the sick, and the poor—and discussing with them their ideas as to how we can improve lives for all of the people in this country. One of the truly remarkable aspects of my campaign was that we showed the world that a successful national campaign could be run without a super PAC, and without being dependent on big-money contributions. We received some $232 million from 8 million individual contributions, from 2.5 million people, averaging $27 per contribution. What my campaign showed, and what poll after poll has shown, is that the American people are sick and tired of big money buying elections and democracy being undermined. The time is now for campaign finance reform—real campaign finance reform.

I have spent a great deal of time looking back at 2016. And even though hindsight doesn’t always offer a perfect view, it offers a unique and valuable perspective. Like many others, I was surprised when Donald Trump was elected president. I had assumed from media polling that Hillary Clinton was going to win. I have asked myself many times since if I was influenced by that assumption. I don’t know. Certainly not consciously, but I would be a fool to say it couldn’t have had an impact on me. It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls. But I don’t know.

The factors that usually decide presidential elections—the economy, likability of the candidates, and so on—added up to a wash, and the outcome came down to a few key swing states. Mitt Romney’s campaign followed a conventional polling approach, grouping voters into broad categories and targeting each one or not. Neil Newhouse, Romney’s pollster, said that “if we can win independents in Ohio, we can win this race.” Romney won them by 7 percent but still lost the state and the election. In contrast, President Obama hired Rayid Ghani, a machine-learning expert, as chief scientist of his campaign, and Ghani proceeded to put together the greatest analytics operation in the history of politics. They consolidated all voter information into a single database; combined it with what they could get from social networking, marketing, and other sources; and set about predicting four things for each individual voter: how likely he or she was to support Obama, show up at the polls, respond to the campaign’s reminders to do so, and change his or her mind about the election based on a conversation about a specific issue. Based on these voter models, every night the campaign ran 66,000 simulations of the election and used the results to direct its army of volunteers: whom to call, which doors to knock on, what to say. In politics, as in business and war, there is nothing worse than seeing your opponent make moves that you don’t understand and don’t know what to do about until it’s too late. That’s what happened to the Romney campaign. They could see the other side buying ads in particular cable stations in particular towns but couldn’t tell why; their crystal ball was too fuzzy. In the end, Obama won every battleground state save North Carolina and by larger margins than even the most accurate pollsters had predicted. The most accurate pollsters, in turn, were the ones (like Nate Silver) who used the most sophisticated prediction techniques; they were less accurate than the Obama campaign because they had fewer resources. But they were a lot more accurate than the traditional pundits, whose predictions were based on their expertise. You might think the 2012 election was a fluke: most elections are not close enough for machine learning to be the deciding factor. But machine learning will cause more elections to be close in the future. In politics, as in everything, learning is an arms race. In the days of Karl Rove, a former direct marketer and data miner, the Republicans were ahead. By 2012, they’d fallen behind, but now they’re catching up again.

In November 2014, Republicans won a historic victory at the polls. We won more seats in the House than any year since the 1920s. We won nine new Senate seats, and retired Harry Reid as majority leader. And the number-one issue that Republican candidates campaigned upon—the top subject of campaign ads across the country—was Obamacare. Did it occur to anyone in Washington that our winning a tsunami of an election focused on Obamacare maybe, just maybe, was a direct result of our having energized and mobilized millions of Americans against it? Not for a moment.

He won that election in the byways,” Bill Deason says. Ava Cox says: “That’s what made Lyndon Johnson be elected the first time.… He told them: ‘I know what you people are up against. Because I’m one of you people.’ And it wasn’t the people of the cities who elected him, but it was the people from the forks of the creeks.” That was indeed the reason he won—and the reason no politician had thought he could win. The polls had not shown his strength at the forks of the creeks, for no poll bothered with the people at the forks of the creeks, as no candidate visited them. But Lyndon Johnson had visited these people. And they had sent him to Congress. N

On October 18, before the numbers had been re-weighted, the campaign’s internal election simulator, dubbed the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory,” gave Trump a 7.8 percent chance of winning the 270 electoral votes he needed. His long odds were mainly due to the fact that he trailed (albeit narrowly) in most of the states that looked like they would decide the election, including the all-important state of Florida. Re-weighting the model to reflect an older, whiter electorate changed the polls by only a couple of percentage points in most of the major battleground states. But it shifted the odds of victory substantially in Trump’s direction because it either put him ahead or made him

For weeks all opinion polls and all responsible commentators had been predicting that there was no hope of the Labour Party being elected on a programme like this. Ever since Harry Perkins had been chosen to lead Labour at a tumultuous party conference two years earlier, the popular press had been saying that this proved what they had always argued – namely that the Labour Party was in the grip of a Marxist conspiracy. Privately the rulers of the great corporations had been gleeful, for they had convinced themselves that the British people were basically moderate and that, however rough the going got, they would never elect a Labour government headed by the likes of Harry Perkins. Picture, therefore, the dismay that swept the lobby of the Athenaeum as the television showed Perkins coming to the rostrum in Sheffield town hall to acknowledge not only his own re-election with a record majority, but to claim victory on behalf of his party. “Comrades,” intoned brother Perkins. “Comrades, my foot.” Sir Arthur Furnival was apoplectic. “Told you the man’s a Communist.

Politico poll, 47 percent of Republicans believed that Trump won the popular vote, compared to 40 percent who believed Hillary Clinton won. In other words, about half of self-identified Republicans said they believe that American elections are massively rigged. Such beliefs may be consequential. A survey conducted in June 2017 asked, “If Donald Trump were to say that the 2020 presidential election should be postponed

Two of the most accurate polling firms, Trafalgar and Susquehanna, predicted something far different: a too-close-to-call nail-biter of a race with Biden up by only one to three points. Despite being far more accurate, those two polling firms were regularly criticized by others in the polling industry for having a right-wing bias.

In another, parallel GOP initiative, beginning in the summer of 2021—in thousands of towns, cities, counties, and states—huge numbers of pro-authoritarian, pro-Trump, anti-democracy GOP supporters signed up to become election monitors, precinct officers, and poll workers.

In a February 2018 interview, Steve Bannon said, “We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall….This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.”15

The media, polling, and Big Tech rigging alone would have been enough to cause Republicans to doubt any election loss, but what Democrats did to the manner in which people vote was further destabilizing to the country... Long-standing historical concerns about the integrity of elections led to the development of a single Election Day, a secret ballot, and governmental running of elections--all developments that went a long way toward building up trust in America's electoral process. In recent years, Democrats have lobbied to move away from each of those things, saying that efforts to stop them from doing so were 'voter suppression.' In the months leading up to 2020, Democrats were able to convince legislators, courts, and election officials to open elections up to ballot trafficking, voting without showing identification, voting without following state laws or guidelines, and counting ballots without oversight from independent observers. Meager checks on fraud, such as signature matching, were watered down to the point of meaninglessness...And then Democrats tried to make permanent all of the radical changes they had made by passing legislation to ban voter ID, legalize vote trafficking weaken absentee voter verifications, and make it more difficult to keep updated lists of voters.

Q: What can ordinary people with busy lives and not a lot of political access do to address this stuff? You can try to address it in your own life. You can try to set up your life so you have to drive as little as possible. In so doing, you vote with your feet and your wallet. When more people bike, walk and use public transit, there is greater pressure on elected officials and government agencies to improve these modes of transportation. It thus increases the profitability of public transit and makes cities more desirable places to live. It also helps reduce your carbon footprint and reduces the amount of money going to automobile manufacturers, oil companies and highway agencies. In a globally connected capitalist world, cities and countries are competing for highly skilled labor—programmers, engineers, scientists, etc. To some degree, these people can live anywhere they want. So San Francisco or my current city in Minnesota aren’t just competing with other U.S. cities but are competing with cities in Europe for the best and brightest talent. Polls and statistics show that more and more skilled people want to live in cities that are walkable, bikeable and have good public transit. Also our population is aging and realizing that they don’t want to be trapped in automobile-oriented retirement communities in Florida or the southwest USA. They also want improved walkability and transit. Finally, there’s been an explosion of obesity in the USA with resulting increases in healthcare costs. Many factors contribute to this but increased amounts of driving and a lack of daily exercise are major factors. City, state and business leaders in the US are increasingly aware of all this. It is part of Gil Peñalosa’s “8-80” message (the former parks commissioner of Bogotá, Colombia) and many other leaders. (2015 interview with Microcosm Publishing)

Many in this generation claim that the election of Barack Obama as president shows that we are postracial. These polls were conducted before the presidency of Donald Trump, but as his election has made clear, we are far from being postracial.

On Election Day, to the surprise of Romney and his backers, Democratic voters turned out in far bigger numbers than the Republicans expected. The Koch network had spent an astounding $407 million at a minimum, most of it from invisible donors. The operatives running the enterprise believed they were able to accurately anticipate how the vote would go, and right until the polls closed on November 6, they, like the Romney team, were convinced victory was at hand.

For himself, Sanjay wasn’t too certain what the election was all about. In a press conference on 25 January 1977 he seemed in characteristic verbal form: Q.: Mr Gandhi, earlier you were against having elections. Are you personally in favour of them now? A.: All in all, seeing things as they are now, it’s okay. If you’d asked me six months ago I would have said no. Q.: What has improved? A.: Nothing. Six months ago I would have thought to wait longer would have been better—which now I do not think. Q.: Would you expect the fact of the Emergency to be the principal issue in the campaign? A.: What do you mean by that? Q.: Well, recently the Janata party has been talking about the Emergency itself as a campaign issue. A.: I don’t think that would be much of a poll issue. Because most of it has happened. It would be a poll issue if it was going to happen. Q.: What about family planning? Do you think that will be a major issue? A.: I don’t think so. Q.: What would you expect would be the major issue? A.: I am not quite sure. BY THE TIME SANJAY arrived in Amethi, he seemed to have shed his earlier fuzziness. He had by then perceived the issues. In speeches he would stress the ‘package’ of progress made during the previous nineteen months, the transformation awaiting Amethi on his election (275 km of hard roads, 1200 km of kutcha roads, a multi-crore textile mill), the disparate nature of the opposition (which usually included an attack on Charan Singh). And then he would come to the programme closest to his heart: family planning via nasbandi. ‘As soon as Sanjay mentioned the words "parivar niyojan" and "nasbandi" the audience would get incensed. We could see the anger seething in their faces. Many of those listening had suffered personally and many more had heard the experiences of friends and neighbours. Congress workers would hang their heads down when Sanjay spoke about those things. They did not dare look the people in the face. By his speeches, Sanjay, instead of making people happy, was making them more and more angry,’ a Block Development Officer from Jagdishpur told me.

I deeply admire the president’s determination to defy the small, poll-driven politics of our day to tackle big things. However, the gap between the singular focus of the campaign and his varied and ambitious agenda afterward undoubtedly sapped some of his political strength, leaving Americans wondering if he was truly focused on their concerns. You can’t take politics entirely out of the process. I don’t speak with the president as much anymore. With the campaigns over, our once-frequent conversations have slowed to a trickle. I miss them. And when I hear the thundering hooves of the Washington pundits and pols on a stampede to run him down, I feel for him. Hell, I bleed for him. The brutal midterm election of 2014 was another painful rebuke. Yet I know this: There are people who are alive today because of the health coverage he made possible. There are soldiers home with their families instead of halfway across the world. There are hundreds of thousands of autoworkers on the assembly line who would have been idled but for him, and the overall economy is in better shape than it has been in years. There are folks who are getting improved deals from their banks and mortgage lenders thanks to new rules in place and a new cop on the beat. There are gay and lesbian Americans who are, for the first time, free to defend their country without having to lie about who they are. There are women who have greater legal recourse when they’re paid less than the man doing the exact same job alongside them. There are families who can afford to send their kids to college because there is more aid available. Oh, and yes . . . just as he predicted in my conference room back in those wonderful, heady days when we first considered an audacious run for the presidency, millions of kids in our country today can dream bigger dreams because Barack Obama has blazed the trail for them.

Errors in Sampling Frames: The 1936 Presidential Election Our discussion of errors in sampling frames would not be complete without mentioning a classic example of sampling failure, the 1936 Reader’s Digest presidential poll. In 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, completing his first term of office as president of the United States, was running against Alf Landon of Kansas, the Republican candidate. Reader’s Digest magazine, in a poll consisting of about 2.4 million individuals, the largest in history, predicted a victory for Landon, forecasting that he would receive 57% of the vote to Roosevelt’s 43%. Contrary to the poll’s prediction, Roosevelt won the election by a landslide—62% to Landon’s 38%. 8 Despite the extremely large sample size, the error was enormous, the largest ever made by any polling organization. The major reason for the error was found in the sampling frame. The Digest had mailed questionnaires to 10 million people whose names and addresses were taken from sources such as telephone directories and club membership lists. In 1936, however, few poor people had telephones, nor were they likely to belong to clubs. Thus the sampling frame was incomplete, as it systematically excluded the poor. That is, the sampling frame did not reflect accurately the actual voter population. This omission was particularly significant because in that year, 1936, the poor voted overwhelmingly for Roosevelt and the well-to-do voted mainly for Landon. 9

Federal intervention to change the institutions in the South started with the decision of the Supreme Court in 1944 that primary elections where only white people could stand were unconstitutional. As we have seen, blacks had been politically disenfranchised in the 1890s with the use of poll taxes and literacy tests (pages 351–357). These tests were routinely manipulated to discriminate against black people, while still allowing poor and illiterate whites to vote. In a famous example from the early 1960s, in Louisiana a white applicant was judged literate after giving the answer “FRDUM FOOF SPETGH” to a question about the state constitution. The Supreme Court decision in 1944 was the opening salvo in the longer battle to open up the political system to blacks, and the Court understood the importance of loosening white control of political parties.