Appendix D: Issues Related to Political Polling

Goals of Polling:

1. Strategic information for political campaign

   The chief goal of polling is to provide you with strategic planning information that is useful for conducting its political campaign. Specifically, you must use your polls to find out which demographic groups are most likely to be your supporters and will be persuaded by your message. Polling simply to find out the current standing of the candidate is useless and a waste of valuable resources. The campaign should conduct each poll with a specific purpose, and should have a specific reason for asking each question on the poll.

2. Discover the attitudes and concerns of voters

   A political campaign is about voters. To be successful, you must talk about the things in which voters are interested in a way that voters can relate to. Polling is an excellent way to measure the attitudes and concerns of voters.

3. Discover the issues that move voters

   Every political activist knows the major issues of the current political campaign. However, given limited resources with which to meet voters, the campaign must know the priorities of the voters among these issues, especially how those priorities differ among sub-sets of the voting population. Polling can help the campaign focus its message and make the best use of its resources.

4. Discover the candidate's position

   Voters perceive each candidate to have its own strengths and weaknesses; a candidate that is perceived to be strongly against corruption, for example, may simultaneously be perceived as weak in dealing with economic or foreign policy. The campaign can use polling to discover exactly where it stands in the minds of the voters and to determine on what issues to focus its campaign.

5. Test messages

   The campaign can use polling to determine the effectiveness of various messages before committing resources toward communicating those messages to voters. Additionally, you can use polling to determine the effectiveness of the messages that opponents are likely to use against them, as well as the best defenses against those messages.

6. Track trends

   As the campaign progresses, you need to know what is happening in the minds of the voters: are they listening to the candidate's messages or to messages of the opponents? Small-scale "tracking polls" can determine this information during the election campaign.

Types of Questions:

1. Screening questions

   Since the purpose of the poll is to formulate election strategy, you should be interested in talking only to those who will actually vote. Political polls typically begin with a set of screening questions to determine who is most likely to vote.

2. Favorability questions

   The campaign needs to determine which parties, leaders, and institutions are viewed favorably or unfavorably by voters. The voter must be encouraged to be honest, to admit that he does not know a name or has no opinion; often, a fake "control" name is used for this purpose.

3. Questions about the general political environment

   These questions might include "Is the country on the right track or the wrong track?" or "Are you better off or worse off now than you were several years ago?" The purpose of such questions is to gauge the overall mood and attitudes of the voters.

4. Issue importance and positioning questions

   These questions ask voters to prioritize the political issues to be discussed in the campaign and to evaluate the parties' performance on these issues. In one variant, voters are asked to rate each issue (crime, inflation, unemployment, etc.) as "extremely important", "very important", "somewhat important", or "not very important"; in another variant, voters are actually asked to prioritize short lists of issues.

5. Leadership qualities and positioning questions

   These questions ask voters to prioritize the characteristics that they wish to see in their political leaders. The wording of these questions is similar to that of the issue importance questions, substituting phrases like "strong", "well-educated", or "understands people like me" for the issue terms.

6. Horse race questions

   Horse-race questions are quite familiar: "If the election were held today, would you vote for Ivan Ivanov or Sergie Arbatov?" While important for tracking progress, these questions are in some sense the least important questions on the poll. In the American context, the primary purpose of such questions is fundraising or the manipulation of the media, not the basis of political strategy. Because a small percentage of voters may identify with parties or candidates, more useful to candidates are questions about whether voters would consider voting for XXX candidate or party; this way potential supporters can be identified by demographic groups.

7. Message testing questions

   Message testing questions might include: "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for a candidate/party with X characteristics?" The purpose, of course, is to test both the party's and the party's opponents' messages to determine their likely effect.

   These questions are often worded neutrally to mask the name of the party or candidate being discussed.

8. Two-sided issue questions

   The purpose of these questions is to find out what voters might think about a particular issue after hearing arguments from both sides. A typical question might be: "Proponents of a certain proposal say X, while opponents of the proposal say Y. Do you strongly agree with the proposal, mildly agree with the proposal, mildly disagree, or strongly disagree?"

9. Demographic questions

   At the end of a poll, voters are usually asked a series of demographic questions (age, income level, education level, etc.) to determine what differences exist among sub-sets of the population. This is important for defining the demographic groups who are supporting your party, undecided, or supporting your opponents. This is also the key to defining issues and messages that work for demographic groups.

Common Mistakes in Design and Use of Polls:

1. Bad sampling

   The sample of the poll must be completely random and must reflect the population that will ultimately vote. Too many or not enough respondents from one sex, age, income, or geographic group, etc. will give inaccurate information about the population as a whole. Screening is critical to ensure that only likely voters respond.

2. Biased questions

   The purpose of the poll is to give the party accurate information. Thus, all questions must be worded in a neutral, non-biased manner in order to get the most honest response. For example, you will never get accurate information about people's attitudes towards Chechnya if you ask questions like "Do you oppose the brutal and illegal invasion of Chechnya by the Russian Federation?" or "Do you favor military action to oppose the Chechen terrorists leading the illegal effort to secede from the Russian Federation?"

3. Asking two questions at once

   Asking two questions at once will give you confusing answers. For example, if you ask the question "Do you favor military action to oppose the Chechen terrorists leading the illegal effort to secede from the Russian Federation", the respondent will not know whether to comment on the legality of Chechen separatist movement or on the rightness of using force to oppose it.

4. Insider questions

   Faulty polls often include questions that are well understood by politicians but not by average people. If the respondent does not understand a question, he cannot give an honest response. For example, few voters will have an opinion on a question like "Do you think that the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty can be applied to the conflict in Chechnya?" but they may have an opinion on a question like "Do you think that Russia should be prohibited by international treaties from using military force within the borders of the Russian Federation?"

5. Questions too general

   Everyone knows that the economy is an important issue in any political campaign. But what exactly about the economy is important? The questions in a poll must be specific to the issues that will be important.

6. Over-reliance on horse race questions

   The answer to a horse-race question is ultimately important only on Election Day. A party should never become over-confident from strong poll results or despondent from weak poll results. Rather, the party should use the poll to determine its strategy for the future.

7. Failure to use cross-tab information to target messages to voter segments

   Voters are not uniform and will not respond in the same way to the same messages. The party should use the poll to find out the differences among sub-sets of voters and to design messages for each target sub-set.