There are others that don’t get the coverage, but yeah, pretty fuckin lame anyway. If only for the fact that they don’t get the coverage.

Focus groups aren’t meant to be used for gaining an understanding of a broad swath of the population. Focus groups are used for exploratory research, concept testing, and understanding the “why” behind opinions and behaviors.

If you want to generalize trends towards large populations, you’re going to need a large sample size. It’s statistics that suggests that many respondents will leave you with extremely low confidence in the outcome.

For example, if you are trying to judge the voting preferences of a population of 100,000 people, you’ll need 383 randomly sampled people in a survey to reach a 95% confidence interval. 13 is nowhere near the amount of people required to cover those that considered themselves “independents” before the debate.

That’s not to say this tells us nothing, but it’s by no means a predictive study.

*edit: I actually would say it’s harmful because I think that it portrays the narrative as if it is predictive, when it’s not.

I’m not surprised. Alito is straight up huffing Newsmax like it’s paint but trying to hide it, Clarence Thomas is outwardly corrupt and unabashedly fascist, and the other conservatives are, weirdly, not as extreme and still attempt to maintain this air of professionalism and integrity in their profession. Don’t get me wrong, they don’t actually and in them we have a religious nut, an idiot frat boy, an egoist, and at the head, a conniving political operator. All of which are driving us closer to fascism in their own style.

But I get the feeling like John Roberts is embarrassed by Clarence Thomas and his clinically insane QAnon conspiracy wife or Alito and his “election was stolen” flag antics. So they’re going to see things differently.

Yeah, that’s a good point. I was trying to be too agreeable with the last guy but I think understanding the psychology of everyone that votes for trump, is enthusiastic about Biden, is on the fence for either of them is important. So we can potentially counteract that

Nope, doesn’t matter why, I’m just flabbergasted that people would still be like “hmmm I dunno, maybe this Trump guy is alright” after everything else. And I’m trying to imagine the psychology of a person that’s on the fence about him for this long.

It’s easier for me to understand the rabid fans and fascists than it is for me to understand those that are up in the air until now, so I was just throwing that out there.

I just do not understand how anyone is on the fence about DJT… Like, they see this conviction and that’s what changes their mind? After everything else?

!remindme

Join the club.

Using this.

The people of Wyoming don’t have the same representation as the people of California. They have way more relative representation. That’s saying that rural votes mean more than urban. A Wyoming resident has 3.6 times more voting power than one in California.

Just to be clear: you’re saying your solution is to vote for Trump though?

This is a similar argument for accelerationism in Marxism. That we should make the world as capitalist as possible because the system will fail quicker and get replaced by something more just.

It’s hard for me to believe that this would actually work in either case. The destruction in the meantime would be too great and it may reach a point where we can’t climb back. In the case of Trump, he wants to be a dictator, and he may push voting rights so far in one direction that the people won’t have a say at all.

I would argue that “the right to vote is fundamental to a democracy” has never been an American conservative ideal. Conservatives have always tried to limit the number and kind of people that can vote and still do: non land owners, ex-slaves, black people, women, ex-felons, and all minorities now. Conservatives have also made a very successful effort to limit the relative power of people’s votes when it doesn’t suit their agenda through gerrymandering and unequal representation.

Also, really not sure what “the Senate should represent the states and not the people” means. Like it should represent the land? Not the people inside the state?