I have neglected to post items here for quite some time. I've been quite busy rearranging my life, living circumstances and work responsibilities.
The June 2016 Primary Election will be upon us before we know it. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to spend some time in the coming months writing my somewhat infamous "Crotty UnOfficial Voter Guide," which attempts to inform, educate and amuse, with an emphasis on amusement.
This election cycle, I'm attempting something new.
I'd like to receive input from those who have insight as relates to the plethora of candidates and issues that will before us for our (presumably informed) opinions regardless of position on the political and policy spectrum.
A few years ago, Pew Research put things this way:
"... [Political] party identification is, an attitude, not a demographic. To put it simply, party identification is one of the aspects of public opinion that our surveys are trying to measure, not something that we know ahead of time like the share of adults who are African American, female, or who live in the South. Particularly in an election cycle, the balance of party identification in surveys will ebb and flow with candidate fortunes, as it should, since the candidates themselves are the defining figureheads of those partisan labels. Thus there is no timely, independent measure of the partisan balance that polls could use for a baseline adjustment.
These shifts in party identification are essential to understanding the dynamics of American politics. In the months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, polls registered a substantial increase in the share of Americans calling themselves Republican. We saw similar shifts in the balance of party identification as the War in Iraq went on, and in the build-up to the Republicans’ 2010 midterm election victory. In all of those instances, had we tried to standardize the balance of party identification in our surveys to some prior levels, our surveys would have fundamentally missed what were significant changes in public opinion.
The clearest evidence of this is the accuracy of the Pew Research Center’s final election estimates. In every presidential election since 1996, our final pre-election surveys have aligned with the actual vote outcome, because we measured rising Democratic or Republican fortunes in each year.
In short, because party identification is so tightly intertwined with candidate preferences, any effort to constrain or affix the partisan balance of a survey would certainly smooth out any peaks and valleys in our survey trends, but would also lead us to miss more fundamental changes in the electorate that may be occurring. In effect, standardizing, smoothing, or otherwise tinkering with the balance of party identification in a survey is tantamount to saying we know how well each candidate is doing before the survey is conducted."
So much for the pollster's views. I am simply asking for a little diversity of opinions and attitudes, hopefully with the same sense of whimsy with which I, and hopefully others of us who do this for a living, must adopt to remain sane. Of course, the preceding sentence is a topic for an entirely different type of discussion, which may or may not occur based on the level of interest.
In summary, I'm essentially putting out a call for entries into my almost bi-annual Voter Guide.
Please send your thoughts, observations, rants and other hopefully salient views on any or all of the choices before us on the June 2016 ballot to crotty@crottyconsulting.com.
Thanks, and let's have some fun!
The June 2016 Primary Election will be upon us before we know it. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to spend some time in the coming months writing my somewhat infamous "Crotty UnOfficial Voter Guide," which attempts to inform, educate and amuse, with an emphasis on amusement.
This election cycle, I'm attempting something new.
I'd like to receive input from those who have insight as relates to the plethora of candidates and issues that will before us for our (presumably informed) opinions regardless of position on the political and policy spectrum.
A few years ago, Pew Research put things this way:
"... [Political] party identification is, an attitude, not a demographic. To put it simply, party identification is one of the aspects of public opinion that our surveys are trying to measure, not something that we know ahead of time like the share of adults who are African American, female, or who live in the South. Particularly in an election cycle, the balance of party identification in surveys will ebb and flow with candidate fortunes, as it should, since the candidates themselves are the defining figureheads of those partisan labels. Thus there is no timely, independent measure of the partisan balance that polls could use for a baseline adjustment.
These shifts in party identification are essential to understanding the dynamics of American politics. In the months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, polls registered a substantial increase in the share of Americans calling themselves Republican. We saw similar shifts in the balance of party identification as the War in Iraq went on, and in the build-up to the Republicans’ 2010 midterm election victory. In all of those instances, had we tried to standardize the balance of party identification in our surveys to some prior levels, our surveys would have fundamentally missed what were significant changes in public opinion.
The clearest evidence of this is the accuracy of the Pew Research Center’s final election estimates. In every presidential election since 1996, our final pre-election surveys have aligned with the actual vote outcome, because we measured rising Democratic or Republican fortunes in each year.
In short, because party identification is so tightly intertwined with candidate preferences, any effort to constrain or affix the partisan balance of a survey would certainly smooth out any peaks and valleys in our survey trends, but would also lead us to miss more fundamental changes in the electorate that may be occurring. In effect, standardizing, smoothing, or otherwise tinkering with the balance of party identification in a survey is tantamount to saying we know how well each candidate is doing before the survey is conducted."
So much for the pollster's views. I am simply asking for a little diversity of opinions and attitudes, hopefully with the same sense of whimsy with which I, and hopefully others of us who do this for a living, must adopt to remain sane. Of course, the preceding sentence is a topic for an entirely different type of discussion, which may or may not occur based on the level of interest.
In summary, I'm essentially putting out a call for entries into my almost bi-annual Voter Guide.
Please send your thoughts, observations, rants and other hopefully salient views on any or all of the choices before us on the June 2016 ballot to crotty@crottyconsulting.com.
Thanks, and let's have some fun!
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