<- All articles

Voter Surveys- Are They Useful?

Brendan Finucane
Brendan Finucane
February 25, 2016
3 min read
Share this post

The credibility of voter surveys has taken a hit in recent years with many people questioning the reliability of results for a number of reasons. The UK general election last year was predicted to be a very close race between Labour and Conservatives but ended up being a landslide for the Tories on election day. Equally, Donald Trump’s rise to the head of the Republican Party primary race seems to defy polls.

What might be the reason for this?

Mobile phone usage has had a huge impact on the contactability of respondents. Without the database of landline numbers, polling companies are finding it increasingly difficult to get hold of people.

Then, those people who can be reached have become very reluctant to take part in surveys. Only around 10% of people contacted will fill out surveys and they often need to be incentivised. The upshot of this is a skepticism about the demographic bias in many polls. Younger people are very difficult to reach or get to take part which can lead to skewed results when extrapolated out to the general population.

Finally, things move fast nowadays. Polls take a snapshot in time and an election day a couple of weeks away can be a very different proposition to today. All the more so when you are talking about elections that are going to take place in the cold of next Winter! The accuracy of polls increases as they become more local and closer to the day in question.

So what can candidates and campaigns do to get a better picture of how voters will vote?

The reality is, the more local voter polling becomes, the more accurate it is. For candidates, this means that you simply have to build surveys into your voter outreach process if you want to gain that valuable insight.

How do you do this?

Build surveys into everything you do, canvassing, social media outreach, your online presence and so on. Then feed this survey data back to one place for a really comprehensive, up to date picture.

Seeing as you are doing all of the hard work, make your surveys a bit more detailed so you can get more out of them. You are asking your voters questions that are relevant to them so think about asking more open-ended questions rather than just, “Who are you voting for?” and “Will you vote?”. Creating dynamic surveys that mine information about issues that are important at a local level has the knock-on effect of giving a really good impression of your campaign to the voter. It tells them that you understand the issues and you care about the responses you are hearing. Basically, it goes back to the idea of all politics being local.

Finally, open-ended and detailed surveys will allow the voters to lead the conversation and dictate campaign messaging to the candidates. It’s almost as if you are representing these people’s aggregated opinions, now wouldn’t that be an interesting idea.

Get your free 7-day trial of Ecanvasser

Sign up now to have our campaign consultants guide you through your 7-day trial

Speak to salesSpeak to sales

Listening to our current users,  we are aware that there can be an internal struggle of team management when it comes to organizing quickly. To get people out on doors, the back and forth over Whatsapp, Messenger, and (insert other apps here) can be endless. We aim to streamline this process for you with Ecanvasser. Now organizers can commit via the Walk app (their canvassing app!) and get notified in the run-up to the event so that they don’t forget. By building it into the door knocking process life has gotten a lot easier for campaign managers.

Written by
Share this post

You may also be interested in

<- Back to list
Case Studies

Voter Surveys- Are They Useful?

Brendan Finucane
3 min read

What’s a Rich Text element?

The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.

Static and dynamic content editing

A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
How to customize formatting for each rich text
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

The credibility of voter surveys has taken a hit in recent years with many people questioning the reliability of results for a number of reasons. The UK general election last year was predicted to be a very close race between Labour and Conservatives but ended up being a landslide for the Tories on election day. Equally, Donald Trump’s rise to the head of the Republican Party primary race seems to defy polls.

What might be the reason for this?

Mobile phone usage has had a huge impact on the contactability of respondents. Without the database of landline numbers, polling companies are finding it increasingly difficult to get hold of people.

Then, those people who can be reached have become very reluctant to take part in surveys. Only around 10% of people contacted will fill out surveys and they often need to be incentivised. The upshot of this is a skepticism about the demographic bias in many polls. Younger people are very difficult to reach or get to take part which can lead to skewed results when extrapolated out to the general population.

Finally, things move fast nowadays. Polls take a snapshot in time and an election day a couple of weeks away can be a very different proposition to today. All the more so when you are talking about elections that are going to take place in the cold of next Winter! The accuracy of polls increases as they become more local and closer to the day in question.

So what can candidates and campaigns do to get a better picture of how voters will vote?

The reality is, the more local voter polling becomes, the more accurate it is. For candidates, this means that you simply have to build surveys into your voter outreach process if you want to gain that valuable insight.

How do you do this?

Build surveys into everything you do, canvassing, social media outreach, your online presence and so on. Then feed this survey data back to one place for a really comprehensive, up to date picture.

Seeing as you are doing all of the hard work, make your surveys a bit more detailed so you can get more out of them. You are asking your voters questions that are relevant to them so think about asking more open-ended questions rather than just, “Who are you voting for?” and “Will you vote?”. Creating dynamic surveys that mine information about issues that are important at a local level has the knock-on effect of giving a really good impression of your campaign to the voter. It tells them that you understand the issues and you care about the responses you are hearing. Basically, it goes back to the idea of all politics being local.

Finally, open-ended and detailed surveys will allow the voters to lead the conversation and dictate campaign messaging to the candidates. It’s almost as if you are representing these people’s aggregated opinions, now wouldn’t that be an interesting idea.

Get your free 7-day trial of Ecanvasser

Sign up now to have our campaign consultants guide you through your 7-day trial

Speak to salesSpeak to sales

Listening to our current users,  we are aware that there can be an internal struggle of team management when it comes to organizing quickly. To get people out on doors, the back and forth over Whatsapp, Messenger, and (insert other apps here) can be endless. We aim to streamline this process for you with Ecanvasser. Now organizers can commit via the Walk app (their canvassing app!) and get notified in the run-up to the event so that they don’t forget. By building it into the door knocking process life has gotten a lot easier for campaign managers.

Read more articles

Let's inspire your inbox

Listening to our current users,  we are aware that there can be an internal struggle of team management when it comes to.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.