Tbh one of the failures of Talk Elections is that it is not representative enough of the US population.
1. Why is this necessarily a failure?
2. You realize that plenty of people who are not American post on this forum, yes?
1: It is my personal belief that every political discussion outlet that is open to everyone should be as representative as possible of the general population. This includes Atlas, but also more websites like for example Reddit's /r/politics and what not.
This is obviously not possible due to several self-selection biases but still it is an ideal to stive for. Check threads from circa 2004-2006 and you can see a forum that was more representative of the US population at the time I believe.
2: Yes I am obviously one of them so I am aware of their exsistance
I am deliberately ignoring foreign posters because the forum is not catered to us. We are welcome to join I suppose but the focus of the site should not be us.
In all honesty I would also want the foreign posters to be representative of their respective countries; but outside of Canada and the UK we are talking about sample sizes of 1-3 people so that is obviously impossible. You will always have statistical outliers and for non-English speaking countries the self-selection bias for foreign posters is way stronger due to the language barrier.
The only country other than the US where we have a sizable population of people enough that we could possibly ask for it is the UK.
And our British posters do indeed suffer from that same issue; where we have a ton of Labour supporters, one lone Lib Dem supporter and that is it I believe (I think there might be a C-UK poster he is nowhere near as prominent as the other British posters). Iirc also all our Scottish supporters are SNP supporters and presumably independence supporters, leaving out 50% of Scotland's population.
So in an ideal world we could certainly use an English Tory and an Scottish Conservative & Unionist as well. But again small sample size so really I am happy with any fellow foreign poster that joins the site
Interestingly our Canadian posters are mostly balanced, with a nice mixture of Tories, NDP and Liberal supporters. I wonder why that is though again, small sample size.
