> If people are honestly this stupid, then why even bother polling them to see what policies they want? This is a serious question: if people don't bother voting based on policies they want, then why is that even important? If this theory of yours is true, then it really seems to call the voting population's basic intelligence into question, not to mention the fundamental idea of democracy itself. If the people are too utterly stupid to vote for their own best interests at least most of the time, then why wouldn't authoritarianism be a better system?

All kinds of things play a role in this 'stupidity': tribalism, decades of anti-socialist propaganda, legitimate concerns based on history, and disengagement. It's completely understandable that one could reject 'socialism' and yet support most of what actual socialist argue in favor of.

> Honestly, I find it easier to believe that the polls are bad. I've seen way too many polls in my lifetime where the questions were manipulative, or just plain poorly worded or chosen.

If you're honestly engaging with me on this, and I'm hoping you are, I'd challenge both of us to do some research and further discuss this. I'm inclined to believe that in this case, with concrete policy questions, the questions and answers are not too manipulative, but of course I don't "know" this. Let's look into it.

> On top of that, the other problem with polls is that they only capture results from people who actually bother to respond to the polls, or are in a place where the pollsters are. Usually, when the latter is brought up, we're supposed to somehow believe that the pollsters have some great methodology that lets them determine what a larger population wants just by sampling a much smaller number of people in that population, but this is completely subject to bias and error.

True, but afaik this generally skews in favor of older, more conservative respondents and, crucially, more socalism-phobic, so to speak.

> And finally, I point again to the 2016 election: predicting a winner is not as hard as asking if they want <thing x>. In this case, the poll is asking exactly the same thing as the election itself will: who do you plan to vote for? Asking about <thing x> is not as easy, because you can get wildly different results by asking the question differently. Do I want "Medicare for All"? Well, the answer might depend on many things, like how exactly it would be implemented. Is private insurance still allowed to exist as a supplement or alternative? Are non-citizens/"illegal aliens"/"migrants" (pick your term) covered? etc. You would probably get very different answers depending on those points in a large poll in America, so if you just ask a simple "do you want it? yes/no" question, that might not align at all with what actual candidates are proposing. Asking "who do you plan to vote for?" avoids that. And in the 2016 election, the polls were nowhere even close to the election results. That tells me the polls were either garbage, or rigged to try to influence the election.

I think with the election polls one of the big issues is exactly the problem you describe earlier. Getting an accurate, representative sample is very difficult. Especially when voting for Trump was, for many people, a kind of social suicide.

That said, you might be right. I am inclined to believe that policy questions, even with all the hidden complication behind implementing said policies, are probably answered honestly and I'm assuming that the sampling is relatively 'honest' too. But I don't know this, and it's absolutely fair to challenge me on that.

What I'll do, one of these days, is look more into this because while I don't think my beliefs depend on the accuracy of these polls, I do think it's important that my beliefs are truthful (as well as my claims). If you're not just interested in defending your beliefs or attacking mine (which I'm not saying you are), I'd very much like it if we could both look further into this and at some point continue the discussion with more than our respective assumptions :). I'm happy to be corrected if the facts are on your side.