28
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] themeatbridge@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

There should be something like Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle for politics (and movie reviews). By observing, analysing and publishing, pundits will (and are probably trying to) affect the outcome.

There is actually something to that. Statisticians look for correlations in voting trends to help predict future results. For instance, some analyst finds that one suburb in Michigan strongly represents the results of every election for the past 50 years. So, the news media picks up on the story and uses that to talk about how the candidates stack up in that suburb. This makes the candidates focus heavily on that suburb, so that the news will say their campaign is strong, which makes people think they are a good candidate, so they get more votes. But candidates could be hyperfocused on the one suburb and don't bother polling the surrounding counties where they have fallen far behind. All it takes is for some people who haven't traditionally voted in large numbers to show up at the polls, and the campaign is caught sleeping.

this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
28 points (100.0% liked)

Australia

3579 readers
93 users here now

A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.

Before you post:

If you're posting anything related to:

If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News

Rules

This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:

Banner Photo

Congratulations to @Tau@aussie.zone who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition

Recommended and Related Communities

Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:

Plus other communities for sport and major cities.

https://aussie.zone/communities

Moderation

Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.

Additionally, we have our instance admins: @lodion@aussie.zone and @Nath@aussie.zone

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS