People-Powered Polling
Now this is something we can really use. Over on dailykos, Yoss is spearheading an effort to help local candidates do their own polling. A bunch of folks have signed on already to help develop methods and tools for campaigns.
One of the biggest obstacles to local and second-tier national candidates in this country is the lack of funding they possess. [...]
The most notable example of this problem is that of reliable polling, which has in the modern era been a tool relegated to the high-budget campaigns with national support and interest. Without the means to do even the smallest of benchmark polls early in the election season, most challengers have no way to convince their parties, or their potential constituency, that they stand a chance. [...]
A big barrier for the little guys. Here’s the proposed solution, with a little outside the box thinking.
There is no reason why small campaigns can not field their own polls using volunteers from their campaign. Twenty people making phone calls in the evening or on weekends with their free minutes could very quickly gather enough information to publish the results.
Yes, yes. yes! For a while now, I’ve been convinced that in these days of everybody getting poorer except for mega-churches and CEOs, we need ways for everyone to have a crack at serving in office, regardless of how much money they have. DragonFly addresses that from the angle of the Clean Money Clean Elections campaign.
Developing open-source, Amish barn-raising polling is a huge part of that as well. It lowers barriers to local candidates, gets more people involved in the process, and ultimately helps everyone.
I’ve signed up for the project, and will post updates on how it’s going and how it’s worked for our local candidates who’ve tried it. If you have any interest in helping, you can sign up with them too.
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Hey, jaysmith36, this sound like something Dan could use?
This is a fascinating and well thought-out blend of the Open Source tradition and grassroots politics. The key to Open Source in the coding community is that so long as certain standards are maintained, individuals can feel free to implement designs that will yield predictable results. In this case, by adhering to a given standard, you provide a grassroots poll with some verifiable sense of legitimacy while defraying the costs considerably.
Another way of thinking about this is that it actually follows the “Exit Poll” design. We tend to think of the phrase “exit poll” as a news buzz word, just a way of saying that they asked people as they exited the building, but in fact it is a specific and rigorous methodology used to determine the legitimacy of elections across the globe. Consider that the next time they tell you the Exit Polls were innaccurate in ‘04! /soapbox
But the Exit Poll, like XML or Digital Certificates in the IT world, is only a model and free for general use. Thus while the circumstances of a given election in a given country may differ from the model, the polling data does not need to change. The same methodology can be applied to polling for campaigns quite readily, in fact, much of the actual theory of the Exit Poll could probably be lifted.
One caveat I would hope they would implement in this plan is full disclosure of polling results. Unless you can see the unflattering data along with the flattering, there’s really no way to know how accurate the model is. Plus, how cool would it be as a blogger to have your hands on all that data for local races? Moreover, how much buzz about local politics might be possible with access to the data?
Although the “do it yourself” version of polling can give you an idea of general sentiments in your district, it’s hard to get scientific data without throwing some $ into the machine. Polling does have its value, there’s no question about it, but if I was running the phone banks for a small campaign right now, I’d probably be working on targeted messages, base building, and fundraising.
It’s hard to say though… I guess different situations call for different types of calls. On the flipside, anyone can get in touch w/ their local campaigns and ask them for a call list/script… I’m POSITIVE they’d be happy to pass some tasks along.
-J
Actually, depending on how small we’re talking, money isn’t really going to do you any good, either, which I think to some extent is the point. Scientific data is best gathered from the largest possible control group, and if you’re talking one county’s-worth of voters, that’s not a very scientific poll, anyway. However, that does not mean that the poll would be without merit if conducted in the best possible way, and that should not always mean spending a ton of money on a third-party company when it’s possible to utilize an Open Source alternative.
Open Source Polling…
Those who have been reading my site know that I have been active in advocating for the Clean Money, Clean Elections system of public campaign financing for a long time. The reason is simple: much though we like to believe we live in a democracy, when …
[...] He also takes my earlier post about People Powered Polling, and really runs with it. It would be great to see these kinds of ideas really catching on locally. [...]