Survey Says...
Election reforms are needed
It’s been a year since the Supreme Court ruled the Executive is above the law, when engaged in “official duties.” Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s desire to bring the country back to “normal” forbid him from creating a test case for the ruling. Old Joe was literally the only one who could do so, but opted instead to allow Executive Immunity to remain uncontested.
It merely would have called for Biden to choose the right target—the most obvious target—and execute the Official Act that might be a crime. He swore to protect America against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and had the capacity to declare insurrectionist Donald Trump and Enemy Combatant and render him to federal prison, just as happened with “America’s Taliban,” Chicagoan Jose Padilla.
It would have drawn accusations of political persecution and when the emergency case was brought to the Supreme Court, the arguments Alito, Thomas, and the three Trump Judges would rule in favor of would have limited the President’s power to do such things, just to get Trump back on the campaign. In retrospect, having hashed out at least that small portion of the president’s ability to target political enemies would have forced some restraint upon future administrations.
Despite decades of Conservative consternation about “legislating from the bench,” the Roberts Court de facto amended the constitution from the bench. They have called into question why “high crimes and misdemeanors” are specified as the only grounds for presidential impeachment, when by their interpretation presidents cannot commit crimes when acting as president.
It is quite obvious that the old constitution has been outpaced, and we have extra-constitutional grounds by which new institutions are being created. The corporate capitalists seized the state long ago and the progression toward a fascist dictatorship was merely a matter of velocity and degree. We have been rehearsing for this for close to sixty years, with COINTELPRO, the Drug Wars, the War on Terror, and now MAGA. With each incarnation, the surveillance becomes more thorough, and the oppression becomes crueler and more overt.
We are not rebuilding America off that broken document, since those who have broken it showed the way for their posterity to do the same. The Democrats would be doing the same thing, if only they had the first chance at it. Look at how they led and cooperated with increased state disciplines in the past; look at who they voted to confirm for court and cabinet appointments; look at how they have supported MAGA politicians’ efforts. And now look at them attack Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy for NYC Mayor. They have suppressed their own party members’ votes when the members opinions were proving “too” progressive. Their version of an ideal society means everyone gets an equal chance to be exploited, regardless of race, sexuality, gender, or creed.
There are many things we are going to have to do to rebuild an operational nation-state, and I am not certain where this particular element will rank in terms of priority, but it has to be right near the top: We have to break the corporate capitalist monopoly over the electoral system. Organizing Congress under a parliamentary system designed for more than just two parties to hold varying degrees of power would open up policy discussions and proposals. Ranked-choice voting for all elections would address the winner-take-all flaws baked into policy-making without costing anyone their vote. Publicly-funded elections so that candidates do not default solely to the interests of those who can afford to buy the office for them.
There’s another part of American political culture that could be changed, and it would not require any legislation to do so: Surveys.
Social researchers understand that the framing of questions and responses rests on a range of assumptions and produces all sorts of bias in results. Merely phrasing a question of opinion, “How did you like the movie?” with the word like will cause responses to skew favorable. What passes for public opinion polling in the United States is actually marketing polling, with fields laid out in commonly-accepted taxonomies and in terms that situate the respondent in a particular frame, in which only the forced responses make any sense.
I once took a job as a survey coder; such tasks are almost fully automated now. In an ironic twist, automation and technology have ruined what was, in the 1990’s, an almost-ideal public survey environment. Most all houses had a land line, which made sample creation and establishing validity much simpler. Though we had answering machines, people were accustomed to picking up their phones when they rang. Generating valid samples today is a huge challenge; people under a certain age prefer texting to making voice calls, and dodging unknown callers by using Caller I.D. is common for people of all ages. The most advanced pollsters have taken to creating weighted samples, to adjust for the people (they believe) they missed or over-counted. Of course, when their weighting estimation is off, all findings tied to that estimation will be wrong.
Elections are horribly-designed public opinion polls. Candidates build themselves around the tropes that were created through non-election polling, because political consultants use marketing surveys and not public opinion polling to shape campaign platforms. Marketing surveys isolate and limit opinions, forcing responses into a smaller selection of categories than actually exist. Their limitations contribute to the Red/Blue hegemony, which itself skews voting results. When Donald Trump first ran against the Republican field in 2015/16, he polled at about 30%. The day after he won enough delegate votes for the Republican party nomination, he started polling in the low/mid-40’s.
People’s opinions about him changed not because of anything about him, and everything about the corporate capitalist party monopoly. It’s from this failure of survey design that the concept of “wasting” one’s vote arises. Any vote for the G, L, or S candidate has no chance of counting toward a guaranteed-victorious D or R candidate. Every losing vote becomes a wasted vote, since this is a winner-take-all process.
Society is built on much broader values than can be encapsulated by a position on gun control or disaster aid, yet all our pre-election issue polling forces matters into these narrow categories for consideration.
Actual question from a 2021 poll:
Is it the federal government’s responsibility to offer relief in the case of natural disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes?
The framing of the question, while apparently neutral, removes the respondent from the scenario. This is a question about the role of the “federal government” (a weighted term, to some), and whether it has “responsibility” (also a weighted term).
A similar question, with the respondent included:
The town you live in has been hit by a natural disaster, the water is no longer safe to drink and one in four residents (including you) are without shelter. Do you believe others should help you survive and rebuild if they have the ability to do so?
This framing places the respondent in the center of the crisis. Some will argue this will improperly bias responses since they may never happen to the respondent. But they will happen to someone, which is who the policy is being made for the sake of.
There’s an old saying that Republicans (at least the traditional ones) do not care about any social issue until it happens to them. This is another way of saying that those with privilege do not consider what it is to lack privilege. Privilege does not feel like anything, and when it is taken away it feels like injustice. This is the root of white, male MAGA who come from outside the economic top 2%. The framing of larger social issues is set within narrow confines where they are the victims, not of income and wealth hoarding by a small minority, but of a government that they are told is helping everyone but them.
So when the promise is made to stop the government from helping anybody, they clamor for it, never comprehending how the government had been supporting them.