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More Than 200 Republicans in Congress Are Skipping February Town Halls with Constituents
VICE News reports on Feb 16:
Members of Congress are set to return to their districts this weekend for their first weeklong recess since Donald Trump's inauguration. Heading home during legislative breaks is nothing new, but this year most Republicans are foregoing a hallowed recess tradition: holding in-person town halls where lawmakers take questions from constituents in a high school gym, local restaurant, or college classroom.
After outpourings of rage at some early town halls--including crowds at an event near Salt Lake City yelling "Do your job!" at Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight Committee--many Republicans are ducking in-person events altogether. Instead they're opting for more controlled Facebook Live or "tele-town halls," where questions can be screened by press secretaries and followups are limited--as are the chances of becoming the next viral meme of the Left.
For the first two months of the new Congress, the 292 Republicans have scheduled just 88 in-person town hall events--and 35 of those sessions are for Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, according to a tabulation conducted by Legistorm. In the first two months of the previous Congress in 2015, by contrast, Republicans held 222 in-person town hall events.
[...] "What happens in politics is that over time, you can get increasingly insulated from people that have a strongly held point of view that's different [from yours]", [said Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina]. Sessions like tele-town halls aren't a good substitute, he said, because "oftentimes they will screen their calls and those forums can be manipulated".
Republicans who get [verbally] roughed up at their town halls have taken to dismissing the attendees as professional organizers. [...] While there is no evidence of paid protesters attending town halls, it is true that Democratic activists have been organizing to manufacture viral moments of confrontation like the tea party movement did in the summer of 2009.
[...] One strategy for activists has been to host their own town halls and invite their representatives to attend. [...] Another method has been to confront senators and representative in public places and demand they hold a town hall.
Examples throughout the week at AlterNet and The Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, Massachusetts.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 25 2017, @12:00PM
If you're believing polls from the same media companies who told you Hillary would win, you're doing credibility wrong.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @01:02PM
In those horse race polls, they don't actually ask the question to which everyone wants the answer.
In fact, they ask every question EXCEPT that one. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [votepact.org]
We've been over this before.
The current question is a much simpler yes or no thing:
Do you approve of the job he's doing?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 25 2017, @04:27PM
Yeah, that was never the real problem. The real problem is they intentionally oversample the people who are going to give them the answer they want to report. Unless you really believe that less than 20% of the population are conservatives?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Saturday February 25 2017, @05:32PM
Controversial candidate like Trump or Europe's extreme right are always under-represented in the raw data because a lot of people won't tell anyone who they are secretly voting for.
Pollsters have had to adjust the numbers for as long as polls have existed, with typically somewhat decent results. It turns out that they have recently been underestimating that factor, probably because a lot of protest vote has been brewing quietly in our PC world.
It's like finding Internet trolls IRL and asking them on camera whether swatting and harassment are acceptable...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @08:33PM
Controversial candidate[s] like Trump or Europe's extreme right are always under-represented in the raw data
One wonders if the same individuals who would be/are fine with adjustments to this political data because of "known" deficiencies in the method are the same ones who bitch about climate data analysis being adjusted when the reasons and methods for the latter are included in the writeup.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @08:58PM
Controversial candidate like Trump or Europe's extreme right are always under-represented in the raw data because a lot of people won't tell anyone who they are secretly voting for.
Nope. [fivethirtyeight.com]
First, the “shy Trump” theory relies on the notion of social desirability bias — the idea that people are reluctant to reveal unpopular opinions. So if the theory is right, we would have expected to see Trump outperform his polls the most in places where he is least popular — and where the stigma against admitting support for Trump would presumably be greatest. (That stigma wouldn’t carry over to the voting booth itself, however, so it would suppress Trump’s polling numbers but not his actual results.) But actual election results indicate that the opposite happened: Trump outperformed his polls by the greatest margin in red states, where he was quite popular. The two states that had the largest polling error for Trump were Tennessee and South Dakota, where Trump won more than 60 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, Trump underperformed his polls in states where the stigma against him would seem to be strongest: deep-blue states like California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York and Washington.2 Overall, as my colleague Carl Bialik and I (as well as Andrew Gelman) have pointed out, there’s a very strong correlation between how Republican a state is and how much better Trump did than polling averages indicated he would.
The second reason to be skeptical of the “shy” theory is that Republican Senate candidates outperformed their polls too. The theory behind the “shy” phenomenon is that voters are reluctant to admit support for particularly controversial or politically incorrect candidates. Yet mainstream Republican Senate candidates such as Ron Johnson, Marco Rubio and Pat Toomey — hardly examples of bomb-throwers like Trump — all did better than the polls indicated they would. They weren’t alone. A look across Senate races reveals that most Republican Senate candidates bested their polls.
[see the article for the actual chart]
Third, Trump didn’t outperform his polls with the specific group of voters who research showed were most likely to hide their support for his candidacy. A Morning Consult study conducted in October found that there were some “shy” Trump voters, enough to suppress his support in polls by a statistically insignificant 2 percentage points. But the study found that the voters most likely to lie to pollsters were those with college degrees. So under the “shy Trump” theory, we’d expect to see Trump outperform his polls on Election Day in states such as Massachusetts and New York with high numbers of people with college degrees. But instead, Trump did better than his polls in states with the highest concentration of white voters without a college degree, including pivotal states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Finally, Trump’s own pollsters told us that there weren’t many shy Trump voters by Election Day. A few months before the election, internal polling showed Trump getting about 3 percentage points more support in polls conducted online or by automated voice recording than in live calls, according to David Wilkinson, data scientist for Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics firm that conducted polling for the campaign. That suggests some Trump supporters were reluctant to reveal their true preference to a telephone interviewer. But in polls conducted just before Election Day, that 3-point gap had narrowed to just 1 or 2 points. “Shy Trump voters started to come out of the woodwork during the course of the election,” said Matthew Oczkowski, director of product for Cambridge Analytica.
The bottom line is that Trump did better than the polls predicted, but he didn’t do so in a pattern consistent with a “shy Trump” effect. It’s more likely that polls underestimated Trump for more conventional reasons, such as underestimating the size of the Republican base or failing to capture how that base coalesced at the end of the campaign.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @01:05AM
quit making excuses for the enemy of humanity.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @08:31PM
The real problem is they intentionally oversample the people who are going to give them the answer they want to report. Unless you really believe that less than 20% of the population are conservatives?
No they do not intentionally oversample. Because response rates are so low nowadays its really hard to get an exact demographic match, but compensating for that is stats 101 - its called weighting. [applied-survey-methods.com] In fact, the national polls said Clinton was ahead by 3.2% [realclearpolitics.com] and she ended up being 2% ahead. In fact, the 2012 election the polls were more wrong, they said Obama was only 0.7% ahead [realclearpolitics.com] when in fact he ended up with 3.9%.
Now go ahead and show us all how utterly fucking stupid you are and cite that podesta email. Go on you innumerate dumbshit, make my day.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 25 2017, @10:22PM
You mean the email specifically asking them to oversample? Yeah, nothing to see there at all. Why would anyone think that was relevant?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @11:02PM
Hey dumbshit!
WHICH poll did the email ask to oversample?
I'll wait right here while you go prove how much of a tribal shit-eating dumbfuck you really are.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 25 2017, @11:55PM
Wait, you think I'm a Republican or a Trump fanboi? Boy have you not been paying attention. At all. I simply hate the Democrats worse than everyone else. They're hands down the most destructive party in the nation as well as being the most dishonest one.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @12:11AM
I think you are a dumbshit who prefers to uncritically repeat bullshit that pleases him rather than question it.
Still waiting for you to figure out which poll that email referred to. I'm pretty sure you won't go look because then you'd have to come face to face with the fact that you are dumbfuckery personified. Easier to bluster, bullshit and deflect than admit you done fucked up yet again.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 26 2017, @02:09AM
A) I'm not going to waste my time looking the email up for an AC.
B) It doesn't make a shit bit of difference what poll it was for or if it was a general statement.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @02:55AM
> A) I'm not going to waste my time looking the email up for an AC.
Haha YOU FUCKING INTELLECTUAL COWARD
Then why did you bring it up?
> B) It doesn't make a shit bit of difference what poll it was for or if it was a general statement.
Hey SHIT-FOR-BRAINS It was an INTERNAL poll. Not for public dissemination.
So for your conspiracy fantasy to be true it means they were lying to themselves.
Which, because you are a SHIT-FOR-BRAINS you will surely decide that was exactly the point because democrats lie to themselves!!!
That's way more believable than the simple fact that you don't know jack-shit about polls. And that you have ZERO FUCKING GEEK CRED to not understand that oversampling in polling means exactly the same thing it does in single processing because polling is literally just another kind of signal processing.
Whatever you gotta tell yourself to feel superior in your willful stupidity you total dumb fucking shit for brains.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @01:13PM
That's right, run off and cower with your tail between your legs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @01:24AM
the people who work on soylent deserve some slack. less coffee for you, AC.
(Score: 2) by Murdoc on Monday February 27 2017, @05:01AM
If you're believing polls from the same media companies who told you Hillary would win, you're doing credibility wrong.
No, they were exactly right. They polled the people, and the people voted for Hillary. It was the Electoral College that voted for Trump, and it wasn't the one polled.