The upcoming presidential election is proving to be the most polarized federal election in recent history. With two separate parties with vastly different worldviews, a clash of ideologies was inevitable. If a recent poll is any indication, this could very well be the last federal election held in a 50-state union as people declare their support for secession.
A recent Kalikow School of Government survey exposed what the Texas Nationalist Movement has been saying for years. In the hearts and minds of a near-majority of Americans, they’d rather separate than remain in a union governed by those with fundamentally different beliefs. The poll’s bombshell findings revealed that 40% of voters would support their state’s secession from the union if their candidate loses.
However, the Kalikow School’s poll had a big problem that also afflicts most polls seeking secession sentiment. It did not provide much insight into the sentiments of voters in specific states, especially those with the biggest independence movements, like Texas. Isolating the numbers down to a state-by-state sample, the sample sizes are much too small to infer anything of meaning.
The poll focused half of its efforts on suburban voters and polled rural and urban voters at 25% each. 1000 suburban residents were questioned while only 500 rural and urban voters were, totaling 2000 survey participants. This doesn’t exactly provide an accurate representation of the voters in any particular state in the union.
The survey brings up many questions about the accuracy of polls regarding government affairs. Polling done on such a small sample size representing an entire country with upwards of 300 million residents can never be considered accurate. A poll on an issue as paramount as this should be done on a state-by-state basis. Texas has one of the largest independence movements in the world, therefore you would find a much higher percentage of poll participants agreeing with secession as opposed to in another state with a smaller or non-existent movement.
The same mistake was made in a Reuters/IPSOS poll from 2014 that found 1 in 4 Americans would support their state’s secession from the union. Those numbers showed 54% of Republicans, 50% of independent voters and 35% of Democrats in Texas supported Texas leaving the union. However, like Kalikow School’s poll, they surveyed a small sample size that was supposed to represent an entire country as well as clustered states into regions and polled them as one. Polls haven’t always been accurate, but polling on a federal level will always be flawed and incorrect.
In order to produce an accurate verdict on the matter and determine the political will of a state’s voters, an entire state’s population must be polled in a binding referendum on secession. The only way forward to a formal TEXIT is a state-wide referendum, allowing the people to make the decision. This is a vote we must have and it is a vote that we will win.
