Polling Quotes
Political polls are very important tools in modern politics. However, they can be, and often are, inaccurate. More often they are misinterpreted, and results can vary extensively depending on how a question is worded. For example, in the 2012 Presidential election Republican Mitt Romney’s polls did not tell him that he would lose by a substantial margin. He, and some of this closest staff, thought they would actually win.
This is one of the great erroneous predictions of American political history. He was not nominated on the second ballot. Nor on the third; Lincoln was
He was referring to Russian elections. The reasons that elections in Russia are not necessary for legitimizing state power to be used by the current government, is that from the early days of the Russian Czars, the tradition and culture assumed that if there is a threat to "Mother Russia", everyone and everything in the state is at the disposal of the government, no matter who is in power. It is so strongly embedded in the culture that although many Russians want fee elections and the right to choose their leaders, they have no question that the government alway has the right and duty to marshall amm the human and physical resources to protect the state, See Quotation 644072 for more on this imporatnt concept in Russia.
