alt Hacker NewsWe really need a rule in politics which bans you (if you're an elected representative) from stating anything about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to a poll of the population of adequate size and quality.
Yes we'd have a lot of lawsuits about it, but it would hardly be a bad use of time to litigate whether a politicians statements about the electorate's beliefs are accurate.
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> We really need a rule in politics which bans you (if you're an elected representative) from stating anything about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to a poll of the population of adequate size and quality.
Except that assumes polls are a good and accurate way to learn the "beliefs of the electorate," which is not true. Not everyone takes polls, not every belief can be expressed in a multiple-choice form, little subtleties in phrasing and order can greatly bias the outcome of a poll, etc.
I don't think it's a good idea to require speech be filtered through such an expensive and imperfect technology.
> We really need a rule in politics
We really need a rule against proposing unenforceable rules.
Just make it broad enough that we never get a candidate promoting themselves as “electable” again.
That get covered by the mechanisms of social credibility.
The thing is... on both the cited occasions (Nixon in 1968, Morrison in 2019), the politicians claiming the average voter agreed with them actually won that election
So, obviously their claims were at least partially true – because if they'd completely misjudged the average voter, they wouldn't have won