I hear that people in the US are suffering from election withdrawal. I understand completely – you spend almost two years rooting for an underdog candidate, only to see him win by a landslide. Total anticlimax. The bastard didn’t even have the consideration to leave any suspense – no recounts, no fraud, not even any quibbles over the voting machines.
Thankfully, American voters do not have this problem here in Israel. Our government has considerately arranged for a series of elections to gently wean us off our addiction. Just today, for instance, I had the privilege of voting for a right-wing, secular thug over a right-wing, Ultra-Orthodox thug in the Jerusalem municipal elections. And come February, I get to vote in the national parliamentary elections too.
(Yes, Tzipi, I know you say that you only had them call the national elections because you couldn’t bring the Shas party into the coalition. But we know better, and we’re grateful.)
The future is looking bright and filled with plenty of fliers, graphs and opinion polls.
Polls in Israel however, suck. Theres no complex weighting, no demographic assumptions. Partially because this is harder to do in Israel (theres no poli science data on the voting habits of russian first generation immigrants, as a random example), and partially because there isn’t this culture of polling.
However, campaign ads here are FAR more entertaining.
By: Daniel Goldberg on November 12, 2008
at 5:15 pm
@Catherine – Nir Barkat is a lot of things, but he is not a thug. You’d be hard-pressed to call him a rightwinger either, but there’s just certain things you can’t say if you want to be considered for a position of power in Jerusalem.
@Daniel – I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s a lot of good people doing hard work as pollsters, my dad being one of them. I can tell you from close up that cracking the demographics and the weights and what to do with the cellphone generation and the new immigrant voters and will the Arabs vote and a million other considerations you don’t know about is what keeps a lot of people in this country up at nights. I don’t know what a ‘culture of polling’ means, but there’s certainly a thriving industry in political polls, market research, etc.
By: Shay on November 17, 2008
at 2:31 am
@Shay, I think you misunderstood me. I’m saying in ISRAEL polling is not understood, not appreciated, while int he U.S polling is an understood and accepted field. The attitude towards polls is quite differant.
By: Daniel Goldberg on November 17, 2008
at 10:57 pm