So all I see in the news, even in the left blogs, is how doomed the Democrats are despite being within the margin of error in 4-5 crucial races, ahead in others and despite the claims of the right-wing media, not one shred of a Republican wave. Not only are there major holes in the polls, there seems to be a media narrative that is trying to become a fulfilling prophecy and keep the people home this Tuesday, November 4th, so you will help their corporate owners send the most radical, extreme, right-wing pro-business Congress in history to Washington to rule on our behalf.
I am here to tell you that not only could the media be very wrong, we could, and I stress the could, be witnessing one of the most potentially bad election predictions in history, one that would rival the past two monumental poll failures of 2010 and 2012.
Obama, the Media and his “Unpopularity”
Obama is unpopular they say. That’s funny, because other than a few brief moments, he has spent most of his time since 2009 in the mid 40s and is unchanged this year. That isn’t popular for sure, even if it is in line with most presidents. Despite what you may believe, Presidents tend to average in the 45-55 range with few exceptions (JFK and Eisenhower) but I never heard them say that about Bush who was in the mid-high 30s, at this point in his presidency. He was never broadly called unpopular till he hit the 20s and was among the low records set by Truman and Nixon. Also, I kept hearing about how Obama was sliding in the polls, for 5 straight months. Turns out they just never reported his upswings. Instead they reported the downswings only in a constant up and down move between 47% and 41%. Media Matters did a study on how it did not change, and called shenanigans.
The media seems to have made it their mission to destroy Obama. I strongly suspect this has to do with his battles with whistle-blowers and the media scandals of last year. He went after many people and one of those guys went on Bill Maher last week and called Obama worse than Bush and Cheney, a charge that seems motivated by personal events, like the Obama Administration trying to put him in jail. None of this stuff is pretty folks, but I’m not putting frosting on it.
Obama is not FDR (even if FDR isn’t FDR at this point), he’s far too conservative, like Hillary is with war, over compensating in the ultra conservative bubble of Washington that, in no way shape or form represents the American people, who are far more socialist and democratic than their billionaire bosses will care to admit.
Also before you tell me that the media is not that petty, though I doubt anyone reading this believes that, don’t forget the Bill Clinton “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” issue that resulted from Clinton kicking the media’s offices out of the West Wing. The “Liberal Media” wrecked the first liberal president in over 20 years over a petty squabble and it took him years to recover and 20 years before we undid the disastrous result of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
The Billionaire Media Boys & Girl Club
It is also important to note that the media is owned and controlled by billionaires, mostly assholes, like Rupert Murdoch and even “Bunga Bunga” Silvio Burlesconi.
These people own and can fire, at any given notice, virtually any journalist in their world-wide grasp. A burn-notice or blacklist too can cause problems for many journalist if they become known as a crazed leftist, aka, someone who tells the truth.
So there isn’t a whole lot of supporters these days for Obama in media and do I really need to get into the corporate world? The socialist president was reelected in Brazil last week and the stocks dropped 200 points on “fears” of something made up or rather. I guess because they didn’t get their way.
Perhaps that is why the Koch Brothers spent $300 Million to defeat Democrats in the most expensive mid-term election in history by a LONG shot! It’s looking to cost $4 Billion just to keep you home! All the while the state of Kansas that the Koch’s purchased lock, stock and barrel, their corporate home. pushed radical conservative ideas like giving away a $1 Billion in state revenue to rich people, utterly, utterly failed. The state is now broke, in a massive deficit and the once presidential candidate Governor Brownback, is about to lose and their purchased Senator is in an extremely close race.
I guess all that ad money doesn’t mean s**t when you ruin the economy does it? Have the conservatives ever had a successful result? I dare you to bring one up. It will get shot down. So I dare you I double dog dare you conservative mother fu**er tell me your stupid plan one more God damn time! Be prepared, because I have all the facts and all you have are talking points.
Gambling on The Polls
Now this is the jelly on the bread right here. Remember that statistics is a science, polling is a business, just ask Nate Silver, aka the polling genius of 2012 now on a mission to get rich. He ran a real time poll on his site over the odds of who would win Game 7 of the World Series, by having a chart that followed the events of the game so instead of enjoying the action, even if you gambled, you can now see the odds of your team losing as if it is a foregone conclusion and the magic of baseball, the hardest sport to predict, is lost until it happens. The chart was a joke btw, and about as useful as a person who tallied the odds of a roulette wheel after you lost your money.
The poker-playing oddsman Nate Silver has said that Democrats would lose the Senate way back in the summer of 2013, as if he was a prophet. All he did was use the general odds that the President’s party tends to lose big in a 2nd presidential term congressional mid-term. It isn’t prophetic or genius, just odds, and as someone who has spent much time in Vegas, the House always wins. That means that despite his website becoming very unpopular among the media, he has gambled his reputation on this election. Now he even admits that we won’t know who will control the Senate on election day.
Why?
All the run-offs. All the close races. All the things he didn’t see coming from a gambler’s view set and they’ve had to admit that there is no wave so it will all come down to turnout, the thing the polls are absolutely terrible at predicting.
He was gambling the odds back in 2012 (to be fair, so did Soapblox back in October, 2012). Though the polls then were wrong like a horse coming in at 100 to 1 and winning, I’ve seen it! So, like any gambler, he’s trying to cover his ass.
The Senate races are just too damn close and that makes any gambler nervous. There are districts in Kentucky that can ruin Mitch McConnell, there are serious doubts about the Latino vote in Georgia and Colorado. There are serious doubts about the polls in Iowa. Don’t double down, don’t put any money down! Even the races that are being predicted for the Democrats are in serious doubt.
Are the Polls Wrong?
You bet! They are usually wrong in some capacity ranging from close but no cigar to 40 points off like Rasmussen was in Hawaii in 2012. Only in politics can you be this wrong and get away with it.
Though it has limits. Gallup announced a sweeping overhaul when it found it’s 2012 results were skewed towards Republicans and they predicted an overwhelming sweep of the Republicans and a President Romney. Doh! Now I rarely see Gallup Polls, except for their unusually skewed anti-Obama Presidential Daily Tracking Poll, which is the one everyone cites when they say the President is unpopular because it is always the lowest, even lower than Rasmussen, and they are partly owned by FoxNews!
When I was a kid, it was all Gallup. Now there are dozens of companies from right-leaning companies like Rasmussen to Vox Populi which is actually a Republican funded organization. Most seem to be fly-by-nights and most seem to skew Republican. Gee. I wonder why? Business is business and it always has a bias.
Ever since Nate Silver (and Soapblox.com) banked successful 2012 predictions on poll averages and gambling statistics, I began to notice an influx of mysterious organizations with very skewed polling results. This sets the average off, for one. Would the Republicans stoop to that? Sure they would and have done much, much worse. Have you seen the Congressional District map in Austin? They carved Austin up so bad they have districts that stretch to Dallas and Houston, hundreds of miles away and the liberal bastion is like Portland, yet doesn’t have one congressman that is sane. No seriously, they are all the brand of wacko, scary conservative that wants to take over this country and establish a theocratic aristocracy. That is just scratching the surface.
2010 and 2012, saw the polling business shaken when their once prophetic predictions were way off by wide margins and they not only couldn’t predict many races, they predicted them wrongly in an embarrassing fashion. Since then, many people like me have lost faith in the polling “institution”.
Isn’t technology getting better? Why are they getting worse?
Well there are many reasons.
Let’s start with the fact that statistics is a science, polling is a business. Selling polls matters more than being accurate. Once polling became big money, there were dozens of organizations looking to collect cash and tell any organization what they wanted to hear.
One of the first lessons in Political Science is that of the poll. If you ask people if they want to help the homeless, they overwhelmingly agree, ask them if they want to help them from public coffers, they split, tell them that it will raise their taxes and they overwhelmingly disagree. Polls on fake propositions on a popular issue also garnered interesting results, as most people who never heard of the issue, didn’t want to sound stupid and gave a Yes or No opinion of a law that didn’t exist.
So you can make any poll result that you like if you are sinister enough to do it. Let’s assume that these companies have, some, integrity and work from there.
What’s a Likely Voter Anyway?
The “Likely Voter” model is at the forefront and always has been. They tend to make judgments of their results to compensate for reality (like a Democrat leading in a mid-term election) and they can never predict who shows up anyway. The Republican organizations tend to do this in general and this is where the skew happens, more so than the issues I am about to get into, though it compounds.
There is also the issue of landlines vs. cellphones. They haven’t been able to figure out the cell phone equation for quite some time, and each election it seems to get worse, not better because more cell phones, less landlines. Could this be the one they get right? Or is it the one they get monumentally wrong? Despite their claims, even Nate Silver has very little confidence in them.
Polling cell phones is hard thanks to the ironically passed by Republicans Do Not Call list. Add to the mix that cell phones have a built in caller-id without a name and you have a bad environment for pollsters. I have picked up a strange area code once and it was a polling organization for politics. I have had caller-ids in the past from Gallup on my now defunct landline, but I missed them.
In the one poll I did participate in, I was conscious of the polls and gave extreme answers. A very similar reason why conservative talk radio’s ratings have plummeted in recent years, because nobody was listening to that crap anyway and filling out their Arbitron diaries as if they spent all day listening to idiots like Rush. Once listening devices were installed the ratings began to collapse. It’s collapsed so badly that Clear Channel, the owners of most of the radio stations and has contracts with Rush, Hannity, Savage, etc., is now owned by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, who are operating at a loss. Piping in the daily brainwashing though is important enough to lose money.
So polls can be manipulated and pollees are conscious of it.
The Latinos
Then there is the issue of the Latinos. As a 3rd gen Latino mutt with a 2nd gen Latina partner, I can tell you much about the Latinos in California and why the Republicans couldn’t get elected here unless Jesus and Mary came down and told them to do so. Yet the polling in Florida, Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, etc. suggests that the Latin votes will be low, which is why they perhaps get Colorado wrong every time. Wherever the Latin and mixed population is a factor, expect it to go against the Republicans and their pure white blood argument. It would work against them in Texas if they didn’t carve up the districts like a bunch of power-hungry cowards (see Austin above).
I also expect voters of African and Latin-American decent to be high in the final count, unlike most polls, Republican and Corporate predictions. White America is living in a bubble. This will come as a shock to them most likely and they have been predicting low numbers on purpose. Which is why they probably believed that ACORN stole the 2012 election even though it had folded years earlier, because the polls are telling them what they want to hear.
Either way, expecting young people, Latinos, Blacks, etc. pissed off at American policy to stay home on election day is folly. Even if they succeed in telling people this election is pointless, the oppression is very real and it will only rise stronger and more profound in the coming years, leading to a new revolution, hopefully non-violent. The longer the 1% puts down the people, the more sharp and more violent the equal and opposite reaction (to coin Newtonian physics) will be.
The Problem with Democracts
I tend to trust the PPP Polls the most, even though they are funded by the Democratic Party, because Democrats are not deceitful and want to see the reality. They can be crafty to win, though they don’t cheat to win, a thing that Republicans seem willing to do every time. The end justifies the means. They seem poised to sweep out the last remaining democratic institutions and if the polls do turn out to be true, the people are ready to let them.
Why?
Well for one the Democrats are a joke. I have this theory that deep down inside, the Dems want to be Republicans because they tend to be, on average, more successful at business and richer than the Republicans, who, with some exceptions, tend to be failed businessmen who learned to suck up to the Chamber of Commerce. Meanwhile Democrats like Diane Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi are enormously wealthy and people like Harry Reid made a career out of sucking up to the casino industry (he is even portrayed in the Scorsese movie Casino through a fictional counter-part).
The Democrats, if they turned out their base would win the election easy. Yet Bill Moyers says that 80% of the working class and lower class Americans will stay home. Perhaps because they are so disenfranchised that they no longer care about democracy and the Democratic party.
What have they done for us lately? Right? Next time you don’t get knocked off your insurance for having a pre-existing condition, you can thank Obama. The expanded Medicade (if you don’t live in a state run by a Republican fascist) and your lower rate increase in premiums this year, a very real thing that Democrats are too much of a wuss to talk about.
Meanwhile… what has the Republican party done for you lately?
Actually. What has the Republican party every done for you? Remember when Bush sent you a check for $300? You know that Obama cut your taxes more but wasn’t a self-aggrandizing douche like Bush so didn’t actually tell you?
Do you even remember the check? It was gone in a flash. Meanwhile the $75,000 checks they handed out to the rich were spent making your voice weaker, by the Republican Party, by billionaires like the Kochs (again spending $300 million to make sure you don’t vote). To buy the loyalty of wacko Tea-baggers and Democrats in Red States.
Republicans are the Symptom of a Dying Democracy
Is it any wonder that people don’t like Democrats. I do, but I f*cking despise Republicans, who are working against almost every single issue the Constitution defends except guns (even if they totally misread the Militia clause aka the 2nd Amendment). One day they talk about freedom, the next day they vote to make your voice weaker, like the Republicans on the Supreme Court did when they said average people don’t have the right to sue corporations as they did in the Walmart case.
People like Louie Gohmert are so stupid they can’t even comprehend basic issues and yet somehow Texas sent this guy to Washington to represent them?
How?
Because they are willing to cheat to win. They carve up Congressional districts into puzzle pieces that disenfranchise everyone but old white people. They take bribes, provide misleading polls, use the law when it suits them, shut it down when it doesn’t, use outside money, vote pro-corporate every time even it goes against the very grass roots Tea Bag idiots that put them in power.
Welcome to reality folks. Unless you are a billionaire or at least a millionaire, the Republican party does not represent you. In fact they are working against you, trying to destroy your representation and change the Constitution to make sure your voice is smaller. They will not do it through popular vote, they will do it through the Supreme Court.
That is why this election matters.
Vote
So I have presented evidence of massive corruption, poll failures that stretch back years and a media that is owned by the same people that are paying hundreds of millions to make sure you stay home. The most expensive mid-term election in American history by a long shot, and yet one of the most unpopular? Hmmmm.
If they are willing to spend that much money to keep you from the duty the Founding Father’s bestowed upon you, I think it is not only your duty to show up, but your duty to get everyone you know to show up too.
Even if you decide to vote Republican, vote! Don’t let the establishment that also owns the Republican party tell you that you don’t matter!
Vote! Get your lazy ass to the polls and vote, even if it is ill conceived. It is still better than not showing up at all because you forgot or don’t care. Do you know how many people died so you have the right to vote?
Freedom isn’t free!
Democracy needs your vote, so show up and vote regardless, but if you really want change, show up and vote against the corporate establishment that hates you. Hold your stomach and vote Democrat to send the rich owners of this country a message.
Election Night
I am not saying that Democrats will win, I am just saying that it makes perfect sense that the Republican Corporate Establishment would lie to you so they can have a landslide, even if it isn’t being predicted at all, and yet, currently being reported by the media they own.
The choice is in the hands of the American People. I think that means you!