If You Can’t Afford a Poll
Friday
May 15, 2009
Some campaigns will never have enough money to hire a professional pollster and others may not have the funds in the early stages of the campaign. What are your options if you can’t afford a poll?
1. Research the past voting history of your district. You should be able to review how your district voted on a large number of state and local issues and candidates. While district voting patterns do change over time, the results of recent elections are one of the most useful sources of research material you can find.
2. Drive or walk around your district and list your observations. You may think you know your community well, but if you take at least a full day to look carefully at the area, you will get a better sense of it. Look at the condition of the streets, note where there is graffiti, see if children are forced to play in the streets due to lack of recreational facilities, look for empty store fronts and housing in poor condition. Are public facilities in one part of town neglected while they are well-cared for in another area? What churches, faith centers, clubs and businesses do you see? Most of us rush from one place to another and tend to go repeatedly to just a few places. Take a significant chunk of time and just see what you can learn. We call this “windshield research.”
3. Listen to people. You notice I didn’t say “talk to people.” Sit at the counter in a coffee shop and try to strike up a conversation about issues. Don’t give your opinion. Just say, “What do you think about…?” a particular issue. Ask the person who cuts your hair what they think and what they are hearing from other people. Listen to as great a variety of people as you can. Most sane people are hesitant to start talking about political issues to someone they don’t know well because political discussion has gotten so antagonistic in recent years. You may have to ease into the topic, but most people are willing to talk once they feel they aren’t going to get a hostile reaction. So, no matter how strong your own opinions are, just shut up and hear what others have to say.
4. One other option is to do a homemade poll with your volunteers making the calls. This can have some validity if it is carefully done and you have someone who knows how to select a random sample, choose good questions, write a good script for the phone team and do the analytical work on the results. However, my experience in using volunteers to make polling calls has been pretty negative. Most volunteers have strong opinions and they can’t resist letting people know how they feel about the candidates and issues. This, of course, completely poisons the results.
If you decide to try doing your own poll, make sure you have someone reliable supervising the callers to make sure they stay with the phone script and remain neutral in the tone they use when talking to the voters. If you can’t put together a good quality poll, just stay with the other types of district research.
