Micro-Polling
Campaigns, and their backers, have to make decisions every day, but they often have nothing but guessing to guide them. Big campaigns use "real" polling, but it doesn't make sense for a candidate spending $10,000 of his own money to run for township supervisor to spend $5000 of it on polling. Better to put the money into another round of mail, with the result that the day after the election he's likely to look back and find it was wasted in a blowout - or that he never really had a chance.
PPC has conducted over fifty of these cheap little micro-polls, and we've learned to accept a number of limitations. For one thing, we limit ourselves to a handful of questions - no more than six or eight. We don't ask voters about their views on issues, nor do we try to probe for "meaning" behind their choices. Instead, using a narrowly selected list, we dial (say) 1000 likely Democratic primary voters, and ask "When you vote next month for county commissioner, if you plan to vote for Bev Baten, press one. If you'll vote for Carol Koenig, press two." Then we say "thank you" and we hang up. (This is a real example from a past election: Ingham County, district 9.)
Typically, of 1000 numbers dialed, we get useful data from between 100 and 150 respondents, depending on how visible the race is. (In the case of the county commission race between Baten and Koenig, we got about 100 completes, in spite of the fact neither was well known or had done much campaigning by the time of the poll.) PPC's charge for conducting such a poll is $400, including the list and a small amount of analysis.
Although robo-calls start with a refusal rate no worse than conventional polling, each additional question causes people to hang up. Not only does this reduce sample size, but it raises questions of comparability between the early questions and the final ones. So PPC doesn't ask if people are (say) Democratic primary voters - we select such households in the first place and proceed directly to the pay dirt questions. We also worry that people may "qualify by lying", that is, some may press whatever buttons seem to be indicated in order to hear the entire poll, resulting in a contaminated sample. So instead of asking people "Do you vote in nearly every election?", we ask the database.
Because we know who answered the questions (actually, we know which household, but not which individual voter) we can tease out crude cross-tabs, looking for major correlations between the answers and the data associated with the phone number in our database.
We aim for fewer completes than conventional polling mainly because we don't fully trust the results anyway. Completing 100 calls gives us a "margin of error" of about +/- 10%, while 400 would improve that to +/- 5%. But I don't trust robo-polling to give me such accuracy, regardless of the sample size - there are simply too many risks of bias. So what's the point of paying for the additional calls? I figure micro-polling has an inherent accuracy, if well-conducted, of about +/- 10%. If somebody needs greater accuracy, they should feel free to spend ten times as much on a real poll.
Another, very practical, reason for accepting the smaller sample size is that in small races we simply can't GET any more data. In the case of the county commissioner example above, we literally called everybody who met the qualifications for whom we had a phone number. Most city and township offices present similar problems.
Micro-polling works best if we combine the horserace result with a generous dollop of local knowledge.
Micro-polling isn't useful - at least in PPC's hands - for assessing issues, or for fine-tuning campaign tactics. Its real strength is where you find yourself wondering what's going on among a well-defined universe, and where the answer is needed to make large strategic decisions.
Cost: $400 per micro-poll.