I mean it's absolutely possible and pretty trivial to do in-house online surveys so that you know whether someone has answered but can't immediately connect answers to individuals, especially if the survey didn't use an in-house web service.
Whether I'd trust a corporation that says some survey is anonymous is another matter entirely though, because I absolutely wouldn't
"Understandable, I hope you have a better one"
I mean sure, that may just be an "innocent" poll and Uihlein might just be genuinely curious about what the percentages are, there is no way I would trust a conservative to not connect those survey answers to people.
Shit, they wouldn't even have to explicitly note down who answered what in the database where they count answers, since employees have to be logged in they can probably look at server & auth logs to deduce who voted for who
Good that the post text had some context, because boy fuckin howdy was I confused for a bit there 😅
Oh yes no disagreement there, but by all appearances it's probably still going to be a fairly close shave – much closer to 50/50 ballpark than, say, 40 / 60 or let alone 30 / 70. So out of the people who do bother to vote, around half of them are still probably going to vote from Trump
Oh yes, liberals absolutely are way worse about this, but I do see it even with actual leftists. It feels like with "centrists," the deal seems to be what you described: a sort of "well, certainly the leopards won't eat my face, and I don't like messing with the status quo because it works well enough for me." However, with some leftists, it seems to be more about an optimistic view of "the human condition" and an assumption that people are, by and large, good and want to do good (even to folks they don't know).
I'm a degrowth anarchist myself, and since I live in Finland, I get to enjoy proportional representation. I vote for a democratic socialist party that is at least reasonably close to my values and actually has a chance of landing parliament seats and governmental positions. Over the decades, I've noted that many "actual" leftist voters and politicians are maybe a bit... well, let's say a bit too upbeat about what sort of animal Homo sapiens actually is. These are folks who genuinely do care about "woke" stuff like intersectionality and put in the work towards really changing things, but who seem to think that deep down, everybody wants a just, more equal society and not a hierarchical hellhole where the "strong" dominate some "lesser" social classes (foreigners, poor people, whatever)
People don’t give precise percentages though when surveyed. They might round to typical fractions like 1/4, 1/3, or they might round to 10 or 20 percent.
Nobody is saying “hmm, I estimate that it would be approximately 37 percent”.
Of course the wisdom of the crowd does wonders for smoothing those coarse estimates, but still, if the crowd is +/- 10 of the real percentage value, I’d say they’re pretty much on the money.
Oh yes absolutely, people would definitely just "eyeball" their estimate and the percentages we see in the graphs are population (well, sample) level averages, but I'd still say that the differences between these average estimates and actual reality are by and large much worse that "on the money". To illustrate, if the estimate for some country was eg. 30% and the real proportion 40%, the relative error – off by a factor of 1.33 – would be smaller than if the estimate is 12% and the real value 2% – off by a factor of 6 – even though both have a 10 point error.
So eg Poles' and Argentinians' estimates are both 12 percentage points off, but because Poland's immigrant population is smaller that means that they overestimated its real size by 650% and so their estimate was 7.5x higher, but Argentinians were "only" off by 460% / 5.6x. 'Strayans were off by 7 points, but their relative error was only around 23%, which is still almost a 1/4 error and their estimate looks like it was the best out of these. The average global error was 100%, so on average people think there's 2x as many immigrants as there actually are, and characterizing that as "pretty much on the money" is, well, maybe a bit generous
My question is, if it's sad and shameful, why is Trump still so popular in polls?
Sure, they may say it's "sad and shameful", but it's clearly not bad enough for them to not want to vote for Trump anyhow.
If Trump was just a normal businessman, he never would have gotten elected. His base likes the horribleness. They think he will be horrible only to people they feel deserve it.
So many on the left seem to think that deep down people are good, and that if they just knew all the horrible shit conservatives are saying and planning they wouldn't vote for them. There's just this near-total refusal to acknowledge that for a scarily large proportion of the population, that horrible shit is their reason for voting for conservatives, and not only will pointing it out not help, trying to educate them generally just won't work.
Right, but those estimates aren't 10% off, but closer to at least 10 percentage points off – percent and percentage points are not the same thing.
Even Australia is ~23% off, and eg. Germany is 42% off, the US is 120% off, UK is 57% off, and eg. Poland is a whopping 650% off
Unlike what some people have been claiming, looks like doubling down on the fascist rhetoric and bigotry hasn't made Trump any less popular.
If anything it's made him more popular.
Finland is surprisingly corrupt (it's just not the sort of corruption where you bribe cops) and Finns are generally stupid and gullible enough to think we're not corrupt