Further Twitter Revolutions
Apr. 20th, 2020 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkitI saw someone recently put up a Twitter poll that read "Who do you think should be president?" Options listed for answers were Biden, Trump, and "Someone better who will never get elected." They then used the fact that that third one was well in the lead to be all "See? We shouldn't vote for Biden and the national committees control who gets elected."
There are a couple of problems with this. One is that your Twitter followers are *not* a random sample. If you're the kind of person who's posting that, the kind of people who follow you are people who are likely to agree with it, because you're probably posting leftist politics normally. Everyone you know agreeing with you, or large swathes of Twitter agreeing with you, is not the same as most people in America agreeing with you.
Another problem is that you didn't specify the "someone better". If your someone better is Sanders, a bunch of people are thinking of Inslee, then a bunch more are thinking "Gary Johnson" or "Bill Weld", and yet more people are thinking "Down with the presidency; anarchist collectives all the way!", you're going to have some problems right there with that vote getting split-- maybe to the point where Biden's got a plurality of people who actually do *want* him to be president, even if he doesn't get a majority. Large numbers of people not being happy with the current presidential candidates are not the same thing as those large numbers of people agreeing on who should replace them.
Y'all lose a lot of the moral high ground when you complain about push polls and media propaganda and then go resort to the same tactics yourselves.
There are a couple of problems with this. One is that your Twitter followers are *not* a random sample. If you're the kind of person who's posting that, the kind of people who follow you are people who are likely to agree with it, because you're probably posting leftist politics normally. Everyone you know agreeing with you, or large swathes of Twitter agreeing with you, is not the same as most people in America agreeing with you.
Another problem is that you didn't specify the "someone better". If your someone better is Sanders, a bunch of people are thinking of Inslee, then a bunch more are thinking "Gary Johnson" or "Bill Weld", and yet more people are thinking "Down with the presidency; anarchist collectives all the way!", you're going to have some problems right there with that vote getting split-- maybe to the point where Biden's got a plurality of people who actually do *want* him to be president, even if he doesn't get a majority. Large numbers of people not being happy with the current presidential candidates are not the same thing as those large numbers of people agreeing on who should replace them.
Y'all lose a lot of the moral high ground when you complain about push polls and media propaganda and then go resort to the same tactics yourselves.
