Rico: re: your latest post: That's...a decent point, actually.
However, I have already spent the last twenty minutes writing a reply to your previous post, and god damned if I'm just going to chuck all that out. So here's the reply I just wrote, even though I think we're a lot closer to common ground now than we were when I was writing it:
Oh please. "Rich white women more likely to vote for rich white woman than black man," is no less contributing a statement than any of the other personal opinion flying around in this thread, including quite a few of yours even on the first page of the thread.
The general election is not going to be Hillary Clinton versus Barack Obama, it's going to be Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama versus John McCain. It's going to be a Democrat versus a Republican. You are suggesting that Republican women will decide, en masse, that they have more in common with a female candidate than a Republican candidate; to back that up, you give anecdotal evidence of a handful of people who have said so.
Fair enough, I suppose. But I can provide anecdotal evidence of Republican women who literally believe that Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster murdered. I can also provide anecdotal evidence of registered Democrats who won't vote for Clinton under any circumstance ('sup Kazz). The difference is, I'm not assuming the election results in November will come down to any of those minority demographics.
And really, you're whining about the use of subjective data in politics, where most of the "objective" data we get is collation of lots of peoples' subjective data?
again.
I'm not complaining about the use of subjective data in politics. "Data" is not the plural of "anecdote". The difference between an anecdote and data is precisely the thing you're so glibly dismissing, the aggregation.
Of course polling data are not objective. Such a statement would be ludicrous; fortunately, nobody here has actually said anything like that. Nobody's arguing that polls are ironclad; if they were, Rudy Giuliani would be the Republican nominee. They're just a better indicator of public opinion than your Aunt Tillie.
What you are suggesting will determine the election is an effect that you don't believe can be measured. That is, by definition, a moot point. It's about as useful as saying the election will be decided by unicorns.