Moderate voters?....not really….

Like the alleged “independent voters,” a lot of “political moderates” don’t really exist.

A recent report on Vox.com explains why:

It’s a pollster’s imperative to more or less neatly categorize folks in a political opinion survey so the news media and the cable TV talking heads can do sound-bite-sized reporting and “analysis.”

David Broockman, a political science prof at the University of California/Berkeley, says “surveys mistake people with diverse political opinions for people with moderate political opinions. The way it works is that a pollster will ask people for their position on a wide range of issues: marijuana legalization, the war in Iraq, universal health care, gay marriage, taxes, climate change, and so on. The answers will then be coded as to whether they're left or right. People who have a mix of answers on the left and the right average out to the middle — and so they're labeled as moderate.

“But when you drill down into those individual answers you find a lot of opinions that are well out of the political mainstream."

In other words, there are a sizable number of folks who, manifestly, have both left-wing views and right-wing views—to make up a caricature example, for instance, a person who strongly supports government-sponsored Obamacare but wants to deport all immigrants immediately.

In the rush to “analyze” the survey results, folks with these seemingly conflicting political views don’t score high as either “liberal” or “conservative,” and so they are categorized—wrongly—as “moderates.”

In the same vein, many so-called “independent” or “undecided” voters superficially claim to be independent but their actual opinions, and more importantly, their actual voting behavior is quite obviously “liberal” or “conservative,” and quite obviously Democrat or Republican.

Of course, all this detailed revelation tends to beg the question: how many of these folks actually vote?

Aye, there’s the rub.

And that’s the biggest problem facing our so-called representative democracy. It really isn’t working.

Everyone should vote ?

Old story: government aid for business

Who is saying "Good job!" to Congress?

They're not even blushing....

Gerrymandering horror