Democracy-ism is the biggest ISM and perhaps must not be talked about.
Kamala talked about democracy way more than about racism or sexism. And her voters responded:
Harris voters thought these issues were most important:
DEMOCRACY: 56%
ABORTION: 21%
ECONOMY: 13%
FOREIGN POLICY: 3%
IMMIGRATION: 2%
Trump voters thought these issues were most important:
IMMIGRATION: 11%
DEMOCRACY: 35%
ECONOMY: 31%
FOREIGN POLICY: 4%
ABORTION: 14%
https://thebannercsi.com/2024/11/05/preliminary-exit-poll-results/
My actual lived experience is this I'm old enough to remember when UNWEIGHTED EXIT polls ROUTINELY predicted outcomes within 0.2% or 0.4%. When i was a kid, the TV showed the actual exit polls as they came in. They basically never varied from election outcomes. I watched them roll in, race after race — senate, president, governor, representative — and as a teen interested in current events (and math), I knew that differences of 0.1% or 0.2% were not surprising, but higher than 0.5%? No, highly doubtful.
Funny thing is that starting IN 2000, that changed. The exit polls became farther off from election results with every election. For one election you could click a button and see the unadjusted results or the adjusted results. Now, you have to pay money to access the unadjusted numbers, say for a university study. They don't want the public to worry their pretty little heads. They pretend that the most important function of exit polls is…wait for it — “to understand what motivated the voting choices of different identity groups”. But for a few democratic decades, it reassured people of the accuracy of the count — and back then, the counts could be observed by human eyes, your neighbors.
You can all claim that reluctant bush responders or lying racists or white women not supporting a nonwhite woman are the reason for the election losses. You can claim “certainty” out of fear of looking like an idiot. But as I’ve indicated, I wasn’t born yesterday, and I’m old enough not to care if i look idiotic. Here’s what I know:
1) There used to be a mechanism called exit polling that was pretty damn accurate, but now it’s distorted by weighting to equal the official results, and whisked out not to corroborate outcomes but only to divide us up by the same ISMs that some here complain about. And
2) The GOP was the image of doom and gloom at the end of the campaign, swaying to songs like a drunken old nightclub act and
3) Kamala Harris should not be faulted for one single thing because she ran a damn fine campaign and any critics can go try to earn their own place at the top of the ticket
In the 1990s, the major news networks and the Associated Press formed a polling consortium called Voter News Service (VNS) to cut costs, eliminating the redundancy of reports from multiple sources. But redundancy isn’t always a bad thing, as proved, disastrously, in 2000 — when VNS (and the networks soon afterward) declared the race for Al Gore around 8 p.m., only to switch to George W. Bush at 2 a.m. and declared the race locked at “too close to call” two hours later.
An embarrassing computer glitch in 2002 sealed the consortium’s fate; it was shuttered soon after and replaced by a different set of pollsters that serve the National Election News Pool. But this organization suffered its own scandal in 2004 when exit poll data was leaked online around midday on Election Day, prompting bloggers to declare John Kerry the presumptive winner. In 2006, the pollsters began quarantining representatives of the NEP to prevent such leaks from occurring.
https://time.com/archive/6936516/a-brief-history-of-exit-polling/
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