There are new types of polls. Imagine the surprise when you answer the telephone and a recorded voice asks you to indicate the candidate for whom you are going to vote. Your first inclination is to hang up. Your second is to see where the questioning goes. There are more options for you than just the person you might already support.
If you know anything about polling techniques, you understand that this type of poll in a municipal campaign would have an extremely high error rate. The first problem is that in the previous election only three out of ten people who were eligible to vote did so. Now you have added people under the legal voting age and other non voters to your sample. It makes you wonder: why bother?
The answer is: mainly because it’s cheap. The autodial and recording software are inexpensive and the system can complete a couple thousand calls very quickly. And the results are immediate. There is no long drawn out analysis of these results: what you see is what you get. At least four groups were using this technique citywide in the recent election in Babel. Three of the groups were each supporting their candidate for mayor.
What was surprising was hearing a rumour that a group of business people in the development industry also paid for one or more of these polls. They were supposedly making sure that they were investing their funds properly. This became somewhat futile when they found the leading candidate was refusing their funds.
The best indication of where you stood in these different polls was the level of personal attack on specific candidates. Mind you, you do not get that nice warm feeling when your candidate is being viciously slandered on behalf of opponents.
But you are inclined to keep it quiet when you realize you are no longer number two but the leader of the pack. First of all, you hardly want your supporters to slack off their effort as you have no idea how strong your lead might really be. There are other indicators: sign destruction is one of the first. It happens as opponents’ helpers recognize the futility of their campaign. There are also those donations that you would really have liked to see early in the campaign that start arriving. There are also the late sign requests and the arrival of more volunteers. Everyone loves a winner.
But you do miss the older, more reliable polling techniques. Telephone coincidental polls with highly trained, live interviewers can tell you a great deal if the questions are couched properly, the answers carefully analysed and the results balanced to the right demographics. At one time, we could consistently forecast federal and provincial elections so precisely that nobody would take our election bets.
Nobody would take our bets in this election. While it was fun to win a side bet on the ‘others’ in the Babel campaign, we would have lost if we had bet on the number of votes for our candidate. He won with a thousand more votes than anticipated.
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