Spork_the_dork t1_ja28pzr wrote on February 26, 2023 at 8:11 AM

Reply to comment by Durumbuzafeju in Hungary signals fresh delay in Finland, Sweden NATO approval, says more talks are needed by green_flash

Any time someone says that the votes in a country do not reflect the true opinions of that country, one must ask, on what basis, exactly, do you think that the vote is skewed against the side you root for?

Durumbuzafeju t1_ja2avih wrote on February 26, 2023 at 8:39 AM

Well, when you need to capture the state-funded media to parrot your propaganda and need to buy up every single newspaper, radio station, TV station in the country while still being the largest spender on Facebook ads for your political bullshit and need to reform the social security to be able to intimidate poor people into voting for you, and on top or that need a ministry of propaganda with an annual budget of 115 million Euros (that last source alone equals the total spending of the largest German parties in a country of 9.6 million) and still only get 54% of the votes, that shows you have serious problems with your popularity.

Spork_the_dork t1_ja2n3t5 wrote on February 26, 2023 at 11:22 AM

Yeah but usually when people make these claims they just make the assumption that their has worse voter turnout than the opposing side. The problem is that you'll usually find that both sides make this same argument so that begs the question: which side is correct or are both wrong?

I guess I'm just sort of averse of making these kinds of assumptions without any data to back it up because usually in statistical science a sample size of some thousands of people in a population of a few million is enough to make pretty accurate estimates on the opinions of those millions of people. With something like elections this is skewed by the fact that the sample isn't completely random, but this is sort of balanced by the huge sample size.

It's easy to fall into the same trap that Republicans did in the states a few years back where they lived in their echo chambers surrounded by other Republicans and just thought that everyone agreed with them. That then lead them to believe that most people in the country must agree with them and the only way that that will make sense is if most people who didn't vote were just lazy Republicans. That lead them to then believe that this time they would have more active voters which would swing the vote to their favor. Then it turned out that the result was far from those expectations, which shocked a bunch of people.

So all I'm really saying is, be careful when you assume things about the voting population when you have a sample size of millions of people disagreeing with your opinion.

Akosjun t1_ja2yrl3 wrote on February 26, 2023 at 1:34 PM

You're absolutely right about the echo chamber thing, though u/Durumbuzafeju was pointing out the fact that they only got 54% of votes (and that's even lower proportion of the voting population's support since a large amount just didn't vote) despite having complete control over state media outlets (that is, parties in the opposition got 5 minutes each in total to demonstrate their campaign on state television) and having bought up many other formerly indepentent magazines and journals (see CEPMF). If, with all this spending and effort on exposure (having invested millions upon millions on CEPMF, Facebook and YouTube ads and so on), they still only get 3,000,000 votes in a country of 9.6 million, it really means that people aren't as supportive as it may seem at first.