I’m sure everyone has been hit up by various organizations asking for your political opinion. The ones I hate are the ones that ask a question like: “How good of a job do you think the governor is doing?”. Then, they only allow you to choose from one of the following responses: great, awesome or outstanding.
Nowhere is there a place where I could answer even remotely negative. So, there is no way they can collect my honest opinion. After they’ve gathered the data, they spin the results by saying something like “of those people who responded to the question, 100% were in favor of the governor’s policies”.
After a few of those, I decided that my responses for all surveys going forward would be to just make shit up. I don’t care what the poll is about or who’s asking. If you’re going to waste my time, I’m going to waste yours. If you’re one of the political pollsters, and find yourself scratching your head because the numbers don’t add up, that would be because of people like me.
The point is, most polls are biased in some way. Rarely is their purpose to educate and inform. Usually, their purpose is to manipulate people.
COVID Poll
Earlier this month, Rasmussen released a report on data they had collected with a survey about potential government responses to COVID.
Here’s one of the more interesting questions: “Would you strongly favor, somewhat favor, somewhat oppose or strongly oppose a proposal to limit the spread of the coronavirus by having federal or state governments require that citizens temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine?”
Notice the use of the word “citizen”. I noticed they didn’t say anything about “non-citizens” (i.e., illegal aliens). I would for sure support locking up illegal aliens, regardless of their vacksination status. That’s what we should be doing already. But they didn’t ask that.
What about if they added some context? What if the question was “Would you support the forced relocation of your grandparents, parents, child, or grandchild?” How many people would really support such a proposal? I suspect not many.
Since Omicron is turning out to be such a non-issue, maybe a better question would have been, “Would you support the forced relocation of your unvacksinated friend or relative if they had a runny nose?” I’m certain that some people would still answer “yes” but the number would pretty small.
A Closer Look
One of the interesting tidbits that came from the survey is that 45% of Democrats would favor moving “citizens” to designated facilities (i.e., concentration camps) if they refuse to get vacksinated.
On the surface, that sounds like about half of all Democrats are insane. That might be true, but we can’t tell for sure by the information from the survey. What most articles about the poll won’t tell you is that they only surveyed 1,016 likely voters. Yup. That’s right. They asked 1,016 people and then used those answers to extrapolate what all Americans think.
To put that in perspective, 1,016 people is just over twenty people per U.S. state. Think of your state. Do you think that if twenty people were polled, their opinion would be representative of the opinions of everyone in your state? Of course not. Even the lowest populated state (which happens to be Wyoming) has more than a half million people. It’s unreasonable to think you could poll twenty people in Wyoming and come to the conclusion that you now know how half a million other people would answer the same poll.
The whole approach of polling only around a thousand people sounds lazy to me. There are 240 million eligible voters in the U.S. About 2/3 of them voted in the last election. So, that means there are about 160 million likely voters.
I’ll admit, there’s a lot I don’t know about statistics, but even I know that using answers you get from .000635% of likely voters is not statistically significant. Especially when you consider that there are a lot of people like me who are going to lie about everything.
So, I think it’s safe to say that you should take this whole survey with a healthy dose of skepticism. With that small of a sample set, you simply can’t reliably discern anything useful. It might be fun to talk about over a beer, but that’s about the end of its usefulness.
By The Numbers
But let’s say they’re right. The country is split pretty much 50-50. So, there are about 80 million Democrats considered to be likely voters. If half of them are in favor of moving the unvacksinated to concentration camps, that’s about 40 million unhinged people right there.
But Democrats aren’t the only ones who would support unvaxed camps. The Rasmussen data also indicated that 22% of likely Republican voters would favor the COVID camps. I tend to doubt that number but let’s go with it anyway. 22% of 80 million likely Republican voters is around 18 million.
So, if you believe the poll, there are around 60 million people in the United States who would support the forced incarceration of people who refuse to take one of the experimental COVID drugs.
Something doesn’t smell right. I could believe a few million people believe this. But 60 million? That’s clearly an unreasonable number.
Crazy But Possible
I have serious doubts about the results of the survey, but such a thing is possible. Australia is already doing it. The government in Australia has gone bat-shit crazy (no pun intended) and the people of Australia, who have rendered themselves powerless to oppose their government, have no choice but to bend over and take it.
And I’m going to tell you, it will never happen here.
There’s a huge difference between the United States and Australia. There are probably a lot of differences but there’s only one that’s relevant here. The big difference between the U.S. and Australia is the almost 400 million privately-owned guns in the United States.
The people in Australia may have given up their ability to defend themselves from a government-gone-wild scenario, but we didn’t.
So, people can talk about forced relocation all day. But nobody is going to do it. Because they can’t. This is precisely the reason the 2nd amendment was created in the first place. To make sure that the government doesn’t go and do something stupid. I dare Joe Biden to try to round up unvacksinated people. I guarantee it won’t end well.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s ignore the privately-owned guns. Who do they think would enforce a forced relocation plan? Local law enforcement agencies all over the country aren’t enforcing the mandates already on the books. Does anyone really think they’re going to start rounding up their friends, families and neighbors to lock them up for having the sniffles? Not going to happen.
So, maybe you think they’ll roll out the military to round people up. Again, not going to happen. Technically, the U.S. military can be used to control U.S. citizens during times of an epidemic. But if the earlier versions of COVID didn’t qualify for the use of military force, then stuffy-nose-Omicron certainly doesn’t either.
And finally…
The Rasmussen survey is misleading because it doesn’t ask the right questions of enough people. But they’re not the only ones at fault.
This survey, and the articles quoting its statistics, are tools used by Conservative fearmongers. Yes, I said Conservative fearmongers. The desire to maximize clicks is strong regardless of political affiliation. And what better way is there to get clicks than to tell people something they already want to hear?
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Come on Conservatives, we’re better than this!
The poll takers should be ashamed of themselves for producing misinformation. And the Conservative media that pushed this out as news should be ashamed for stooping to the very level they claim to be above.
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