Scott Walker’s departure from the crowded GOP race probably won’t have much impact on candidate standings. His support had fallen to 5% or so before he dropped out on September 21. There weren’t many supporters left to spread around. But every edge counts. It’s reasonable to ask who might benefit from his withdrawal and whether…
Author: Flywheel
Candidates
Ranked Choice Polling for the 2016 GOP Presidential Campaign
by Flywheel •
Just as ranked choice voting offers a better way to run multi-candidate elections, it promises a boon to public opinion research. Here’s a demonstration of how data collected by a recent online ranked choice survey could have been used to anticipate Carly Fiorina’s and Marco Rubio’s recent surges in the GOP race. The source data…
Candidates
Lots of Stuff Happened
by Flywheel •
I attended the Annual Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research — AAPOR. It was a great experience, and I used the opportunity to pitch the virtues of ranked choice polling to folks at NBC, CNN, et al, and even Nate Silver. But nothing came of it. The Iowa Straw poll was cancelled.…
Candidates, Iowa Straw Poll, Money Primary
The Campaign Finance Heresies of Jeff Link and the ACLU
by Flywheel •
Exceptionally wealthy donors and professional fundraisers are rapidly gaining influence in American Presidential elections, and they’re doing it at the expense of voters. The constant task of raising money is clearly driving our “democracy,” even if we can’t predict where. There’s no doubt, however, that candidates are putting more and more of their very scarce time into dialing for dollars. The…
Candidates, Iowa Straw Poll, Sygnol
Straw Poll Strategies
by Flywheel •
Users of previous ranked choice straw poll sites I created are being invited by email to try AimsPoll. The message I’m sending out has a short description of what’s going on. I wanted to say more, but the initial draft got way too long. So, anyone interested in the full thought process can read it here.…
Candidates
Hilvetica and Marshall McLuhan
by Flywheel •
The Media Ecology Association (MEA) is a group comprised of folks who know something of the work of Marshall McLuhan. (Not everyone will get that oblique reference. It hints at a scene in Woody Allen’s film, Annie Hall, where McLuhan plays himself in a cameo role, and puts down a pontificator with the line “You know nothing of…
Sygnol
Pairwise Pain vs. Ranked-Choice Relief
by Flywheel •
Here’s a handy formula that expresses a key virtue of ranked-choice interfaces over head-to-head pairwise evaluations… N(N-1)/2. Head-to-head interfaces are typical of “Whose hotter?” sites such as candobetter.com. The point is to simplify the task of evaluating a long list of options. Users view a randomly selected pair of images from a large set, and…
Candidates, Sygnol
Rank Them All
by Flywheel •
Note from April 8, 2015. I spent several days with SurveyMonkey before discovering and falling in awe wwih SurveyGizmo. Unfortunately, Gizmo doesn’t have Monekey’s very nice question element styling feature, which I was using to put candidate pictures in the sortable list object. But so many other features are so good, the scales tip heavily.…
Sygnol, Twitter Primary
More Twitter Traction Metrics
by Flywheel •
During the process of collecting Twitter metrics on the candidates, I started adding in comparisons of several voter-oriented online groups. It’s intriguing to see which folks put a lot of effort into tweeting, despite having relatively small numbers of followers. That’s why the traction metric is useful. Going for volume without enough traction risks wheel spinning.
Iowa Straw Poll
Iowa Straw Poll in Play
by Flywheel •
The Iowa Straw Poll has been a showcase of GOP politics since 1979, taking place mid-summer before a Presidential election, but only in cycles when no Republican incumbent would be seeking a second term. George H.W. Bush took the first one, followed by Pat Robertson in 1987. Bob Dole and Phil Gramm tied in 1995.…