Cool project! The results of all the archived votes made sense to me, but I was most surprised by this one:
> The U.S. was right to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO)
> 62% Agree - 38% Disagree
I didn't know that the WHO had such a negative reputation. We are quite fond of such international institutions in the EU at least (ranging from a force for good to fairly harmless). What's the context? The rest of the votes seem quite liberal leaning otherwise.
Thank you that makes sense. I did a bit more research for context:
The US only left in 2020 and then rejoined in 2021, I suppose that’s why I didn’t remember it as a big thing.
The US was also just paying ~15%. It was the biggest governmental funder, with Germany at ~9% as the second. But the WHO is apparently mostly funded by charity donations, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was paying ~5% for instance.
(it’s awkward to list sources on the phone but should be easy to verify)
I do get the sentiment though from the perspective of the US, I don’t mean to argue your points.
Thanks for checking it out!
Most of my voters have come from Reddit and Bluesky so far, which is primarily where the left leaning is coming from. My X account was unfortunately suspended lol. I put an appeal in, but was originally flagged I think do to a new account, political content, and lots of links to the polls. I use an OG dynamic card generator so if I post a link to that poll or result, it creates a card for it on the fly. I think X didn't like that since I wasn't established.
That one was interesting, I am not really sure why that one skewed so far the other directly. I did not have the discussion section open yet (and just slowly getting a few active users), but that was the original reason I added the discussion. I don't know who users are, what their demographics are, etc.. (and I don't want to store that info), so hopefully in the future polls like that people will explain the "why".
I need to build some more analytics into the site (both frontend and backend) so I can analyze the data and visualize it, and so users on the frontend can get better ideas on what is happening.
One of the reasons is that the US pays for a whole lot of those international institutions, creating policy and governance issues that end up beyond local accountability. The "force for good, or fairly harmless" rubric changes when it's your money. Then it becomes "why are they spending my money on that bullshit when we have fires to put out at home?"
Covid era politicization and the fallout from that has a lot to do with it as well.