As an election (hopefully) comes to a satisfactory and stabilized conclusion next week, I’m here with one guy’s random thoughts:
• Polls are as valid as their methodology, and I am having some doubts. One of the main principles in polling is being based on random sampling. Maybe they have developed some sophisticated techniques that I don’t know about, but just how do you account for huge swaths of people refusing to answer a telephone call from an unfamiliar number? I don’t, or I would be answering 15-20 robocalls a day.
Polling may have been in its infancy in the 1930s, but it got a very famous black eye when the Literary Digest predicted the 1936 presidential election in favor of Alf Landon.
The trouble was, their polling depended on telephone calls – at a time when most of the American homes had no telephone.
Franklin Roosevelt won a second term by the most lopsided margin in our history.
Landon carried exactly one single state, and he and the Literary Digest were never heard from again.
• America’s system of party primaries may not be broken—yet—but it is getting there. With the help of computerized gerrymandering of districts, both the Georgia House of Representatives and the Senate feature stacks of non-competitive districts, at least in terms of Democrats vs.
Republicans.
These non-competitive stacks amount to roughly 90 percent of the seats.
An Atlanta-area map of either house’s districts looks like a Rorschach test. The first result is that any competition comes in the party primaries, where the angriest, loudest (and may I add, most incompetent) voices tend to trump more moderate ones. They call it “getting primaried.”
All too often, a second result comes in a general election featuring the choice between two my-way-or-the-highway wingnuts who would find the tedious work of governing both boring and difficult.
A sign of hope came in last spring’s primaries, when Georgia Republicans roundly rejected every one of Donald Trump’s endorsed “primaried” candidates, save Hershel Walker, who had no problems with name recognition in Georgia.
However, it saddens me to see Walker’s wondrous athletic legacy tarnished by being talked into an ill-conceived run for the U.S. Senate.
• Georgia’s new election laws may carry some unintended consequences.
The main one that concerns me, given our experience with the 2020 presidential election when Trump simply claimed victory after he got an early lead in Pennsylvania, comes in the order and magnitude of reported vote counts.
The order of reported results likely will start with the counties’ advance votes, typically heavy with older, more conservative, rural – and increasingly less populated – areas. All they have to do is run the advance ballots through the counter.
Next, the absentee ballots. Just run them through the counter.
Last will come the in-person voting on election day, given all the checks and balances in the paperwork from the voting precincts, the packing of equipment, and the drive to the main elections office.
The magnitude of the differences coming in later from the more urban counties could be massive.
In the 2020 census, 30 of Georgia’s 159 counties – about one in five – lost population, yet the state added a million new residents, roughly a 10-percent increase. Most of the build-up came in the 30-plus counties in the Atlanta Metro.
As an example, Putnam reported a little over 4,000 ballots cast during the first two weeks of advance voting. Fulton County, 195,000. DeKalb, 127,000. Cobb, 114,000.
Gwinnett, 111,000.
Those kinds of numbers can be game-changers.