Types of political polls and realignment in American electoral history

¶ … Straw polls -- which are non-binding measures used to determine the mood of some political body such as a legislature, by taking a count of every member's opinion, before a more formal vote is taken.

Telephone polls -- consisting of calls to randomly-selected subjects to determine their opinions on some issue of concern or, alternately, their likelihood to vote for some candidate in an election.

Online polls- which are polls distributed to persons who self-select to be subjects by visiting a website, used to provide a less-scientific measure of support for some policy or candidate.

Tracking polls -- which gauge the changes in opinion for some population on some issue over a period of time.

Exit polls -- which are taken on the day of an election to determine which candidates were favored by voters as they leave a polling station, used to forecast winners in elections.

These are the major types. Telephone polls are the most scientific, even when sample selection is weighted to account for difference in the population. Exit polls, Tracking polls, and Straw polls all have their specific uses, and are designed to measure the likelihood of some event occurring so that opinion can be shaped or enhanced through other means. Online polls usually serve merely as marketing devices, unless strict measures are put in to control multiple voting. Finally, there are some additional variants, such as pseudo-polls in the form of push polls, which attempt to ask questions in such a way that the subjects are forced into thinking about or responding to questions in particular ways, to gin up response rates that favor the interests of the polling agent. Sample sizes and selections differ according to the requirements of the poll. Typically margins of error are reported to weigh the validity of the poll dependent on the outcome and sample size.

Realignments

Realignments are major shifts in party affiliations among the general public that seem to occur with an infrequent regularity in American history. They are characterized by the exchanging of party loyalties among wide swathes of the electorate, as new ideas are presented by the two dominant parties in the American system, and the positions taken by these parties cause people to change their affiliations. It is a little like a nationwide game of musical chairs.

Realignments can occur over a generation, across many elections, so that people who typically voted with one party now vote with another. Such has occurred in the South, as the region changed during the last decades of the Twentieth Century from a historical allegiance to the Democratic Party to a solid backing of the Republicans in most major elections. It has also occurred among black voters, who shifted allegiance from the Republican Party to the Democrat Party during roughly the same period. These gradual shifts are called secular realignments.

Realignments can also occur quickly among large groups in the electorate during the course of a single election. These are usually driven by heated national debates over contentious issues, or by singularly provocative national figures. They have occurred (at a minimum) during the Civil War, as the gold standard was being debated and William Jennings Bryan was running for president, and during the Great Depression. Such realignments are called party realignments or critical realignments, and the earthquakes they send throughout the American political system can often be felt for generations afterward.

Interest Groups

People join interest groups to pool their resources and combine their efforts in ways that help them to achieve interests that they share with other members of the group. It is not obvious that people should join interest groups. Once a policy is passed everyone gets to take advantage of the benefit, regardless of whether they contributed to the cause of passage. It might make sense, therefore, for people to simply sit and wait for the crowd to do its work and then take part in the collective benefit. This is the essence of the free rider problem. And in fact, such a situation is sometimes the case. For example, in the case of a worker in a right to work state, he might join a workplace where collective bargaining has taken place so that he gets the benefits, but he may opt out of participating in the union. However, Americans generally are a passionate and committed people who want to have some say in their government. Their interest in self-government is, perhaps, at least as strong as their apathy about working in groups to achieve ends, and so they join in ways that make them feel comfortable, by contributing money or knocking on doors or volunteering their time and money in some other way. The culture encourages and supports such acts of civic duty, and people find themselves motivated to carry their own load.

Another reason that people join interest groups is that there is a flipside to the free rider problem. This is: Not only does everyone benefit equally from a policy whether they acted on it or not, everyone also suffers from it equally. Since the nation is a nation of closely divided ideological forces, with approximately half the people thinking the government should govern one way while the other half wants another direction, people stay involved in interest groups in order to make sure that their side wins as often as possible, that when they don't win they are able to lose less severely.