So, I’m doing my part as a loyal little card-carrying (yes! I got a card in the mail today!) DNC foot soldier to go out and there and valiantly freep* the online polls to the benefit of My Candidate. I did it for all three debates, despite not being able to watch a one of them (for a variety of reasons—I have all of them on TiVo though!).
And guess what? Sayonara, online polls: Of the 20 or so sites I’ve clicked on, only one asked who won tonight’s debate. Instead i found instant polls asking me if the debates changed my mind, or if I think domestic affairs or foreign affairs will play more heavily in this election.
I think the answer to who won was a foregone conclusion.
(*Freep comes from “Free Republic,” a truly abhorrent online society of ‘wingers who make the John Birch Society look like the Young Campus Communists. They are notorious for voicing such delightful sentiments as that anyone who doesn’t goosestep with them should be shot as a traitor. They also are fond of voting in online polls en masse—that damn Frenchy talk again—because Wolf Blitzer or whoever would always announce the results of the completely meaningless online poll as though it were handed down from the Mount. So now online polls get “freeped” by both sides. Although Kerry won by gigantic margins in the previous online polls, so maybe there aren’t enough Freepers out there…)
A few weeks ago, I looked at the FreeRepublic site, and saw a discussion about the Obama-Keyes election. They were all expressing glee at how Keyes would trounce Obama in November, humiliate him on the campaign trail, and eat him for breakfast in debates.
So, yeah – they’re rabid right wingers and all, but I can’t bring myself to be worked up over people who have so little connection to reality.
The only polls I have participated in are MSNBC (which is always heavily slanted toward Kerry — last night it was an 82% win for him — and the AOL poll which has made Kerry the winner every time (and Edwards, too) but by much closer margins.
I hit a number of other websites without actually finding polls to vote in.
And by the way, congrats on having a program that actually remembers my info from one comment to the next so that I don’t have to retype it every time.