Any day now the fall campaigning will kick into gear and your phone will ring.
I like the sudden explosion of polls and factoids gleaned (supposedly) from public opinion. No one ever phones me and asks the questions I want to answer. Mostly they ask me, “If the primary election was tomorrow, would you pick Mitt Romney or Deputy Dawg?” and I get to say, “Deputy Dawg is an option? I choose the Dawg.”
But just for the hay of it, here’s the Gita official primer on polls. You can clip this and paste it on your fridge for when the phone rings. No charge.
First, beware of push polls. This is a political campaign technique in which a person or party tries to influence or alter your opinion under the guise of conducting a poll. Push polls are actually a type of negative campaigning.
For example: “Knowing that Barack Obama has less experience in foreign affairs than the other leading candidates, would you feel safer with Hillary Clinton or Obama?”
Or, and this is a likely one for the GOP, “Rudy Giuliani has said he supports abortion. Would you feel he’d make a better or worse moral leader for America than Mitt Romney?”
Now, a straw poll is a different matter. It’s an informal survey among party activists or likely voters to gauge public opinion about an issue or a candidate. The candidate/organization really wants to know what the voters think. Yaay!
Later, they might tailor their messages to fit public sentiment. Boo!
Straw polls are commonly used early in political caucuses, where the purpose is to select delegates and vote on resolutions.
Then there are those large polls taken by professionals like the Gallup organization (for money) and those are used by the mass media to reveal public opinion. The professional poll typically uses a random sampling method over a finite amount of time (24 hours, say) to keep the level of bias to a minimum.
In a 2006 article for the Arkansas News Bureau, writer David Sanders explains how a “benchmark” poll works. This is usually a 50-question poll with a 500-person sample conducted over one night. It gives the candidate a solid understanding of general opinions and attitudes about his or her candidacy and issues of importance. I can think of John Edwards doing a benchmark poll to test whether his anti-poverty campaign is working for or against him.
Finally, you might be contacted for a tracking poll. Tracking usually begins two weeks out from Election Day and ends on the weekend before voters go to the polls. It consists of a rolling sample of 500 voters.
Tracking polls give candidates a day-to-day snapshot of how voters see a race. The pollster provides demographic information that shows a candidate how well his or her message is selling with a specific voter group — say, soccer Moms or Rustbelt Labor.
With tracking data, candidates can then quickly respond with new ads at a moment’s notice and maybe turn the race in his or her favor.
All this presupposes that the candidate has money. Polls don’t come cheap.
To see what candidates are spending on polls and ads, even at this early stage, you can look up campaign spending online per candidate and see.
It’s fun! Go to the Federal Elections Commission at:
http://www.fec.gov/DisclosureSearch/mapApp.do?drillLevel=US&cand_id=P80003338
Choose a candidate and look at disbursements. Or just let the vast amount of money totals wash over you. Lull you. Soothe you. Reassure you that soon, one of those very rich people will be calling on your phone.
Posted by Gita under National | No Comments »
