Donald Trump’s Surprise Victory Proves That Polls Should Never Again Be Used to Exclude Candidates From the Presidential Debates
The Only Criteria For Inclusion In The Presidential Debates Should Be Enough Ballot Access to Reach 270 Electoral Votes. In the 2016 Election That Would Have Been Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party (on the ballot in all 50 states, plus D.C.), and Jill Stein of the Green Party (on the ballot in 45 states, plus D.C).
It turns out that prognosticating about the outcomes of elections based on self-selected groups is not a science, but a tool used by propagandist in an attempt to sway election results. As Newton Minow, a previous vice-chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) wrote, the people behind the polls are “an aristocracy of unelected analysts and observers” who can manipulate election outcomes and should not be allowed to do so in a democracy.
It is obvious, on face value alone, that when the supposed “nonpartisan” Commission on Presidential Debates intentionally enumerated the 15% national polling criteria for inclusion in the debates, they did so specifically to shut out third party candidates. How reasonable is it to require small third party organizations to reach a national 15% polling average with considerably less resources, without receiving media attention and without the ability to use the forum of the debates themselves to offer their proposals to a distracted public? The CPD knew exactly what it was doing when it chose to use polls and to set the percentage bar that high.
But it is actually more sinister than this because the 15% was not only chosen because it was unreachable, but because they could make it unreachable by using polls that manipulated the data and ignored the error margins.
When Gary Johnson entered the race, and during the weeks before the first debate, he was polling at 12% nationally. That fact alone should have allowed him to be included in the presidential debates because he was within the error bar, or margin of error (MoE), which is a basic and necessary part of communicating about statistics.
Yet none of the “experts” advocated for his inclusion in the debates by acknowledging that his 12% polling satisfied the 15% requirement with a 3% MoE.
Indeed, the pollsters, these elite intellectuals, these self-procraimed scientists, supposedly bound by ethics, supposedly bound by their use of knowledge in enlightened ways, CHOSE to use all the corrupt methods available to them, use all the known biases, all the worst practices, to drive Gary Johnson’s poll numbers down.
How? Let me count the ways:
- They did not put Gary Johnson on equal footing with Trump and Clinton, thus marginalizing him and in effect making their polling unethical push-polling that guided respondents’ answers. In the primaries when over a dozen candidates ran for the Republican nomination, pollsters just read a list of candidates, and asked respondents to choose one. In the general election, with only a handful of viable candidates running, they decided that reading a list of three or four was too much, so they only asked respondents to choose between Trump and Clinton, and only after a number of questions about only those two candidates did they ask about Gary Johnson or Jill Stein. But question order biases responses, and forcing people to choose one of two candidates first makes it harder for the respondents to then change their answer, and so Gary Johnson’s poll numbers went down.
- They intentionally under-sampled independents, millennials, and military personnel who were supporiting Gary Johnson in the 30% range, and instead focused on strong Republican and Strong Democrat areas, which skewed the results, and so Gary Johnson’s poll numbers went down.
- They never gave Gary Johnson the forced choice advantage they gave Clinton and Trump, by never conducting polls that asked respondents to just choose between Gary Johnson and Donald Trump, or choose between Gary Johnson and Hillary Clinton. The fact is that had they done this — and why were they so incurious, these supposed seekers of truth? — Gary Johnson would have beaten each resoundingly and the numerous headlines proclaiming that he could beat both would have propelled him to the presidency. That is why they did not do it.
- They advertised heavily how Gary Johnson was dropping in the polls, how third parties can never win as a matter of historical fact, thus driving Gary Johnson’s poll numbers even further down.
Does any of this seem like the work of a true science? Does it seem like polling is conducted by ethical neutral observers?
The truth is that the foundation of polling is bias. That is why polling is not and can never be a science, which seeks the truth by always questioning assumptions, not using biases to build models of a phony reality that reflects not the actual truth, but simply the wishes of self-proclaimed “analysts”.
And make no mistake that the polls were wrong. They were wrong! They were completely and utterly wrong! Don’t for a minute think that because they can talk about probabilities that they were right in some kind of twisted sense because they gave Trump a 30% chance to win and are asking you now to ignore the man behind the curtain.
Here is the truth, and it is the truth of why the Commission on Presidential Debates chose to use polls, and chose the 15% criteria, in the first place:
People are persuaded to NOT vote for a candidate due to their BELIEF that the candidate CANNOT win because of a low position in the polls, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that assures that candidate WILL NOT win.
This is the manipulation that is the reason mostly Left wing “experts” push polling. It is a tool to discourage voters from voting their consciences and coerce them into voting for some corrupt politician instead. Everyone, from the most educated, the most intelligent, the most thoughful, to the least, is susceptible to self-fullfilling prophecy. It is tremendously powerful.
But you can never again trust polling after Donald Trump’s victory!
The people in this spurious field will come back with some new model, some excuse, some new methodologies, but you must never forget that wether subconscious or not, polls can be manipulated, the data can be wrong, and you should never make a decision that is influenced in any way by polls.
Polls should be relegated to curiosities at carnival fairs alongside fortune telling, which also deals in probabilities, as does the entire universe.
And you should not choose your president based on what a bunch of people who claim to have magical crystal balls into the future are saying. Never do this again!
To be clear, I am not just casting aspersions here. The professional polling organizations themselves have, to their credit, acknowledged that they were utterly and completely wrong:
They have acknowledged that their assumptions, their biases, their subjective opinions are the foundation of polling and can therefore make their predictions absolutely wrong.
So what use is there for a tool that will sometimes be completely erroneous? Would you buy a watch, or a car, that you knew one day would just unexpectedly, incomprehensibly, competely and fully go bust? No. So don’t buy into polls again!
Polling can never be a science no matter how much pseudo-intellectual jargon, how many numbers, how many models and graphs they throw at us. Polling is a flawed technique, no better than water dowsing, that in the end does more harm than good because of the potential that it can impact voting behavior itself.
If journalists, politicians, researchers want to know about a candidate’s level of support, go and actually talk to voters. Seek them out, attend rallies, attend meetings, read comments left on articles, engage through social media, and ask them, personally, how they got to support or not support a candidate.
If you want to uphold the values that founded this nation — free speech, democracy, meritocracy — do all you can to allow more voices to be heard in the presidential debates.
Please contact your representatives and ask them to pass a law that would prevent the Commission on Presidential Debates, or any entity that hosts presidential debates in the future, from using polling to decide which candidates can join the presidential debates. The only criteria should be whether the candidate is on the ballot in enough states to reach 270 electoral votes and thus become president.
The Trump presidency, and any authoritarian horrors or human-rights abuses that may stem from it, is the direct result of the decision by the CPD to exclude third parties from the debates by using poll numbers.
This most un-American, this tyrannical system that prevented Gary Johnson and Jill Stein from joining the presidential debates, that silenced their voices on the issues, that shut out their criticisms of the Republican and Democrat parties, and that prevented their proposals from being heard, is why the electorate was left with no choice but to embrace one of two deeply flawed candidates with terrible policy proposals, as their president.
The CPD should take responsibility for giving us the Trump presidency, and every one of us who worked and hoped that our country would give us better candidates must never let them forget that the best way to decide a president is not by excluding divergent voices, but by including them and thus letting well-informed voters decide elections based on issues and proposals.
The presidential debates should be returned to a truly independent agency, like the League of Women Voters, and the purpose should be to give the public a full unfiltered view of the different voices that are yearning to be expressed, rather that as a tool of the establishment to hold on to power no matter the consequences to liberty.
We have allowed the two party corruption to narrow our choices to different flavors of tyranny. Our Anti-trust laws should be used to prevent what is in effect collusion between the Republican and Democrat parties via the CPD to keep out third party competition, given the inherent economic ramifications that this unholy union has on the country.
The forum of the presidential debates is a public space, so excluding viable presidential candidates from them violates their protected free speech rights. In addition, this exclusion clearly does not serve the interests of the public or the state, as evidenced by the election of Donald Trump.
We have to fight to get our democracy back, one that would allow a regular person like Gary Johnson, who built a successful business and became a re-elected governor, to be our president.
Instead we were forced to choose between Trump, an oligarch who has benefitted from his close ties to politicians, and Clinton, a politician who has sold government access for thirty years to all manner of crooks.
As Gary Johnson has said, we deserve better, and it starts by never again allowing polls to exclude presidential candidates from the debate stage.
Please do your part. Don’t stay silent. You have the power, and the duty, to fight for liberty and choice.
Please contact your representatives. Don’t go quietly into the night.
In four years we can have a robust debate about issues and solutions, and perhaps choose, or help the current president understand, the best available proposals to solve our social and economic problems.
As former Governor Christie Todd Whitman said, “America can only benefit from more ideas in the presidential race.” And really, not just America, but the whole world benefits from open and honest discussion about government policies and the underlying belief systems that guide them.
It is a real tragedy that the Libertarian Party and the Green Party proposals were not included and honestly presented to the public, and only distorted bits and pieces were offered instead, which essentially kept the electorate ignorant and powerless.
We can do better and we will do better if we never again allow candidates, at any level of office, from city council to president, to be excluded from the debate stage because of polling.
If ideas have real merit, no one should be scared to defend them; this is what an open and free democracy is all about.
And if ideas do not have merit, no one should support a system that prevents these bad ideas from being challenged; this is tyranny.
Do your part, and we can all #LiveFree!
