Beltway Spin Podcasts

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Why The Generic Ballot Question?

In case you might have been out of the US the last several months, the generic ballot question in polling surveys has been frequently talked about on cable news. But is it really a valid question to ask poll respondents to begin with? Generic ballot simply means there are no specific candidates. Have you ever voted in any election where there was no specific candidates? Whether the election is local, state, or national, there are always specific candidates one must vote for 100% of the time. When this question has been asked previously about "Should President Obama be re-elected?" or "Who would you vote for: President Obama or Governor Palin?" You generally would get entirely different responses based upon which question was asked of respondents. So why ask this question to begin with?

My answer is it gives the "inside the beltway" media types more meaningless "stuff" to talk about for endless hours (a horse race type of story,whose up whose down) instead of covering real issues in America that actually are affecting our daily lives. It seems this generation of television news anchors seems to thrive on meaningless things.

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