My worry about the polls is the wording of the questions. For example, suppose you are interested in what determines whether a person supports or opposes "Trump's handling of immigration”? Responses on a Likert scale:
1. Strongly Agree.
2. Agree
3 .Disagree
4. Strongly Disagree.
( 0 =Not applicable, 8 Don’t Know, 9 Not Answered are all coded as missing values.)
Should this be modeled as an OLS model where the dependent variable is a continuous scale indicating increasing disagreement, from 1 to 4?
Or as an OLS/ Linear Probability Model for the probability of Agree vs Disagree, where Strongly Agree is collapsed into Agree, and Strongly Disagree is collapsed into Disagree?
Or as a Logistic Regression for the probability of Agree vs Disagree, with the same collapsing?
All in all, garbage in, garbage out is my view on polls.
The most important fact about the electoral college is that all states except smallish Nebraska and Maine maximize their power by casting 100% of the electoral college for the popular vote winner. This could be characterized many ways but not as "anti-majoritarian," as it over-rewards the majority in the state.
Presumably, states would also maximize their power under a popular vote system by maximizing the vote differential in their state between the majority party's presidential candidate and the alternatives. How they might do this we already know since the end of Reconstruction and recent moves to disenfranchise the opposition. With the electoral college, such moves have a limited impact, only being important in large competitive states, especially the places most able to combat the problem -- Florida in 2000 only gives you an appetizer of the problems to come with a never-tested popular vote system.
I’m not entirely sure what the argument you’re making is, but it sounds like you’re averse to a modified electoral college where a state gives all of its votes to the winner of the nationwide popular vote because... of the potential for counting errors? I’m not advocating for such a system, but at any rate the EC actually maximizes the impacts of vote-counting troubles by increasing their sway over the outcome of the contest in competitive states. Thus concern would be mitigated within a system where localized vote-counting errors are competing against stability in the whole country’s systems.
And re: the first point, the _national_ byproduct of the EC system is certainly the increased probability of anti-majoritarian outcomes. The state-level institutional consequences are besides the point.
Counting errors are a minor problem; ballot stuffing and disenfranchisement is a major problem. If all that is required is a popular vote majority, as it is measured, then partisans will do what it takes to get a "majority," including -- as much of the country did for much of our history -- intimidation, de-registration, purges, voter "identification," restrictive voting by mail, and the like, all of which are currently going on in order to create partisan popular vote "majorities" at the state level for elections for governor, senator, and other offices. Because a vote subtracted has the same impact as a vote added and because a vote in a one-party area counts the same as a vote in a competitive area, the popular vote incentive is for partisans to pack ballots and discourage opposition voting where they are least likely to be caught, in their most partisan areas. The Jim Crow system's majority is what you are treating as a "majority."
My worry about the polls is the wording of the questions. For example, suppose you are interested in what determines whether a person supports or opposes "Trump's handling of immigration”? Responses on a Likert scale:
1. Strongly Agree.
2. Agree
3 .Disagree
4. Strongly Disagree.
( 0 =Not applicable, 8 Don’t Know, 9 Not Answered are all coded as missing values.)
Should this be modeled as an OLS model where the dependent variable is a continuous scale indicating increasing disagreement, from 1 to 4?
Or as an OLS/ Linear Probability Model for the probability of Agree vs Disagree, where Strongly Agree is collapsed into Agree, and Strongly Disagree is collapsed into Disagree?
Or as a Logistic Regression for the probability of Agree vs Disagree, with the same collapsing?
All in all, garbage in, garbage out is my view on polls.
The good news is that most polls aren’t garbage!
The most important fact about the electoral college is that all states except smallish Nebraska and Maine maximize their power by casting 100% of the electoral college for the popular vote winner. This could be characterized many ways but not as "anti-majoritarian," as it over-rewards the majority in the state.
Presumably, states would also maximize their power under a popular vote system by maximizing the vote differential in their state between the majority party's presidential candidate and the alternatives. How they might do this we already know since the end of Reconstruction and recent moves to disenfranchise the opposition. With the electoral college, such moves have a limited impact, only being important in large competitive states, especially the places most able to combat the problem -- Florida in 2000 only gives you an appetizer of the problems to come with a never-tested popular vote system.
I’m not entirely sure what the argument you’re making is, but it sounds like you’re averse to a modified electoral college where a state gives all of its votes to the winner of the nationwide popular vote because... of the potential for counting errors? I’m not advocating for such a system, but at any rate the EC actually maximizes the impacts of vote-counting troubles by increasing their sway over the outcome of the contest in competitive states. Thus concern would be mitigated within a system where localized vote-counting errors are competing against stability in the whole country’s systems.
And re: the first point, the _national_ byproduct of the EC system is certainly the increased probability of anti-majoritarian outcomes. The state-level institutional consequences are besides the point.
Counting errors are a minor problem; ballot stuffing and disenfranchisement is a major problem. If all that is required is a popular vote majority, as it is measured, then partisans will do what it takes to get a "majority," including -- as much of the country did for much of our history -- intimidation, de-registration, purges, voter "identification," restrictive voting by mail, and the like, all of which are currently going on in order to create partisan popular vote "majorities" at the state level for elections for governor, senator, and other offices. Because a vote subtracted has the same impact as a vote added and because a vote in a one-party area counts the same as a vote in a competitive area, the popular vote incentive is for partisans to pack ballots and discourage opposition voting where they are least likely to be caught, in their most partisan areas. The Jim Crow system's majority is what you are treating as a "majority."