Prez Debate Town Hall meeting participants from St. Louis

[sui generis]

fellow rocket scientists, doesn't it seem a bit odd that we've chosen a single highly non-representative demographic to be our "town hall" questioners? As far as I know, St. Louis is pretty conservative, and a demo of undecided voters from there only represents undecided voters from the midwest, which is not even remotely representative of the U.S. in general. Am I reading this wrong?

"The town meeting participants will review their questions with the moderator before the debate for the sole purpose of avoiding duplicate questions. The participants in the town meeting, to be chosen by the Gallup Organization, will be undecided voters from the St. Louis, Missouri, standard metropolitan statistical area."

[Search Party]

1. "avoiding duplicate questions." MY ASS

[dogtag]

2. Add my ass to that! (n/t)

[sistersofmercy]

3. St Louis has a lot of liberals

In fact I'm seeing more anti-bush* and pro Kerry bumper stickers around St Louis than bush* bumper stickers. It's at least a 5 to 1 ratio, if not greater. I think St Louis has a reputation of being conservative because for the most part we practice polite politics here. Dems and Repubs work and live side by side here. My guess is the St Louis area is pretty close to a 50/50 split between the parties. Does anyone have stats on the party numbers for St Louis?

[Cocoa]

4. the people doing the choosing are the bigger factor

St. Louis probably has a lot of dems in the city center, and republicans in the suburbs. I'm guessing that it could serve as a good representation of the country, but unfortunately, Gallup is the one doing the selecting.

[napi21]

5. I have no idea why they chose MO, but the retail ind. chooses

MN. to do most of their research. I have no idea why, but all the research the retail industry does, they do all their product testing at the Mall of America, in MN.

When I worked in the Mfg. business that made products for retail, I asked that question. The response was that through years of research, they found that area produces the best indication of how the rest of America will kile their products.

I've lived in a lot of diffeent places, but none in the North Sentral part of the country. I do believe that there has been extensive research for the business community to decide on MN. Maybe the politicians have done just as much research. We'll see by what questions are asked.