MyDD Primary/Caucus Polling Project 2007
by Jonathan Singer, Wed Mar 14, 2007 at 11:58:12 AM EDT
For some time Chris, I and some others have knocked around the idea of MyDD commissioning a round or several rounds of polling between now and the time Democratic voters head to caucuses and primaries early next year, in part because the existing polling either has too loose a screen on participants, in part because they're asking the wrong questions and in part because they're not asking the questions important to us. To this end, on Saturday Chris asked the MyDD community if it would be willing to sponsor four rounds of polls of likely Nevada Democratic caucus-goers from SurveyUSA at a cost of a little under $10,000. The response was noticeably mixed.
Today, we'd like to come at this question from a different angle, taking a few steps back.
- Would you be interested in supporting a round or a number of rounds of primary/caucus polling between now and early next year? If so, would you like to see one state polled or instead something like a composite of the first four states (Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina)?
- What type of demographic questions would you like to see asked? In addition to a horserace type question, would you be interested in the percentage of likely Democratic voters/caucus-goers in an early state or all of the early states participate in the blogosphere? Consider themselves to be a part of the netroots?
- What issue questions would you want polled? Are there important questions you haven't seen asked in the polls commissioned by the establishment media? Are there questions that have been worded just plain poorly by these pollsters?
- Should there be questions related to the progressive media/progressive movement? Something on Fox News hosting Democratic debates, perhaps?
- Anything else?
These questions would offer both an insight into the broad sentiments of likely caucus-goers and primary voters and crosstabs to see if there is a correlation between voters' sentiments on these issues and their support for a particular candidate or issue. With all of this data, we could learn more about how the netroots are playing and can continue to play a role in the Nevada caucuses.
In terms of expenses, basic quotes from SurveyUSA indicate that a first round of polling would cost about $4,000 (including one-time expenses) and that subsequent rounds would cost about $2,000 per poll. SurveyUSA would seem to be a good choice both because polls using prerecorded interviews are significantly less expensive than those using live interviewers and because SurveyUSA had a very good track record in 2006.
So, anyway, is this broadly the type of project that you would support the MyDD community undertaking over the next several months? And if we do commission polling between now and the first caucuses and primaries, what, where and whom would you like to see polled?
Update [2007-3-14 16:10:40 by Jonathan Singer]: I've added a multiple choice poll in the extended entry, so please fill that out to let us know what your sentiments are.
Tags: meta, MyDD, MyDD Poll, Nevada Caucuses (all tags)
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