Random Variance #1
(Wayland Phillips, Oct. 11, 2004)
A friend of mine, on a group blog I'm a part of said, "Polls should be banned during the campaign period. Period."
This really got my brain churning.
It would never, ever, pass the free speech test, but imagine by some miracle, it was passed into law and The US Supreme Court didn't overturn it.
Politicians would have to go through the election, not knowing where they stand. There would be no "swing states." Forcing the candidates to focus on every single state, because they would never know how comfortable a lead they had in any state.
Now on the other hand, another possible effect of this is, they would only focus on the states with the largest populations, so as to garner the most electoral votes. But, whatever candidates that would be willing to focus on some of the smaller population states, as long as he was at least somewhat competitive, would have a distinct advantage.
Another possibility is that they could go with historical trends; however, as the disclaimer goes, "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
Lets keep on this though, outlaw all political polls during the election. Including how voters feel about certain issues. All of a sudden, you've got the possibility of honest politicians, at least during the election. They won't waffle due to the polls, because there are no polls. They would be unable to figure out if their strategy is successful or failing. In short, they would have to be themselves.
Would it ever happen here? No way.
But it's interesting to think about.
Wayland