Should voters choose the person they want to represent their party in the general election? Or should the party?
Transcript
(for paying members)
Hi there. Let’s talk about candidates and political parties and putting thumbs on scales.
There’s an older expression that some of our younger viewers and listeners may not be familiar with, and that is putting your thumb on the scale. It comes from when you would go to a store to buy groceries, say meat, and you would go to the meat counter, and instead of having a digital scale or something like that, they would have a balance scale. And they would put a weight, like a pound, on one side of the balance, and then the meat you were buying on the other side. And when the scale balanced, then you knew you were getting a pound of meat.
One of the tricks that some butchers would use is that, as they were weighing what you were buying, they would put their thumb on the scale to make it look like you were getting more meat than you really were.
