What About: Let The People Decide Who Debates Whom

Politics
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What if the voters decided who was on the debate stage via a poll on the hosting news station’s site. Voters could go there and vote on a number candidates, including those who are not in the two mainstream parties.

This is not unlike polls, except you could vote for a candidate you wanted to see on the stage that you would not normally vote for.

What do you guys think?

2

Yay for thread stats.

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You’d have to think what standard would have to be met in the people’s decision versus what failed metric happened to miss the network standard. I don’t know if having people without serious campaigns behind them should get on the stage as equals and then if they do well, hope to build a campaign infrastructure afterwards.

For instance, during the Republican primaries back in 2016 I think, they had the main debate and then another kids table at one point because they had too many for one stage even by network standards that eventually thinned the herd. Would there be no thinning with people voting in a poll? Would candidates with even less of a chance and no actual campaign get into the debate because 5k people said they wanted to see them?

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4

Have you ever seen the clown show that is the New York gubernatorial debate?

Seriously, go watch one and see why we limit participation in debates.

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You need to understand the fundamental difference between “voters going to a website” and traditional polling.

In traditional polling the polling organization contacts the respondents based on random selection and track various demographics (voter v. non-voter, age, race, socio economic status, etc.) and obtain results. They can then apply correction factors to even out demographics skews v. population.

On the other hand "“voters going to a website” has numerous inherent problems:

  • There is no way to know if the respondent is a “voter” or not.
  • There is no way to know if the respondent is even in the US (due to VPN’s) and not foreign respondents.
  • There is no way to know if a single respondent responds multiple time through techniques that mask their internet browser provide that spoof the receiving website (using different browsers, different devices, going to different locations for different WiFi networks, using VPN’s, etc.). In other words a small group floods the site with false responses.

Just a few off the top of my head.

WW

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