Nov 10, 2006 5:00 AM
by Brad Bannon, The Examiner
WASHINGTON – Democrats should enjoy their honeymoon because it won’t last very long. Public opinion is as fuckle as a celebrity marriage, and the Democratic victory on Tuesday will create problems, as well as possibilities, for the party.
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Aug 7, 2006 5:00 AM
by Brad Bannon, The Examiner
WASHINGTON – The Democratic primary in Connecticut for United States Senate between the incumbent Joe Lieberman and his challenger Ned Lamont on Aug. 8 and is much more important than any other primary election this year. Any race for the United States Senate is high stakes poker to begin with, but this Senate race has profound implications for the balance of power in the Democratic Party now and for the 2008 campaign for president. Read the rest of this entry »
Thursday, June 21st, 2007
By Brad Bannon
When sailors navigate, they look to the stars. When politicians legislate, they look to the polls. But sometimes, the sky is cloudy and often polls are contradictory. Then you have to go with your gut.
The new Democratic congressional majority has already done a lot to repair the image of a Congress that fell into disrepute under Republic control, but the Democrats still have a lot of work to do. Read the rest of this entry »
June 21st, 2007
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
By Brad Bannon
The good news for the polling industry was that the national telephone surveys conducted over the days leading up to the presidential election reflected the actual election result with most of them showing President Bush with a slim lead over his Democratic challenger John Kerry. The bad news is that the post-election exit polls conducted after the Americans had voted were way off.
Even in an imperfect world, a post-election survey should reflect the actual results better than a pre election survey.
In a pre-election survey, the pollster faces several problems. First, you have to find people to talk to which is a major problem when you’re trying to call people at home on land lines. Once you reach the person at the phone number from your sample, you have to figure out if the person you’re talking to (a.k.a., the respondent) is actually someone who is going to vote which in itself is a matter of some difficulty. People also might change their minds during the time period leading up to the election.
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Friday, August 06, 2004
By Brad Bannon
Watching the polls is not nearly as interesting as watching Catherine Zeta Jones but it is an election year and a presidential election year at that and we are political professionals so we should be keeping close tabs on the national political surveys. And if we use the national polls to understand the presidential race, we should use them for good not for evil. The biggest problem with the national political surveys conducted by news organizations is the reliance and the prominence of the trial heats. The head to heads are the first and sometimes only thing that the sponsors report. But if you really want to understand the public opinion environment that governs the presidential race, you have to go to the poll websites to look under the hood and kick the tires.
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Sunday, June 04, 2006
By Brad Bannon
Usually it’s “all politics is local” but this year, it may be that “all politics is national”.
The national public opinion climate looks pretty bleak for Republicans. Only one out of every three Americans approve of George W. Bush’s performance as President. Two out of every three Americans believe that the United States is off on the wrong track. The approval rating for the GOP controlled Congress is even lower than the President’s rating as only a quarter of the public give thumbs up to the folks on Capitol Hill. What does this mean for Republicans up and down the ballot this year? Big Trouble.
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Sunday, July 03, 2005
By Brad Bannon
At the national, state and local level there are a lot of angry voters these days and a lot of that anger is a function of the chasm between the issues that politicians talk about and the problems that voters worry about.
Current events in Washington DC illustrate the problem. While members in Congress fiddle with the fates of Terry Schiavo and faceless figures like John Bolton and Priscilla Owen, Americans focus on the two big issues of the day- the economy and Iraq.
MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEM
War in Iraq 19%
Economy/Jobs 19%
Terrorism 7%
Social Security 5%
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Wednesday, March 02, 2005
By Brad Bannon
In the same way that high school football players can learn a lot about the game by watching the pros play in the Super Bowl, local political activists should be able to learn a lot about campaigns by watching the players in the presidential race.
By the same token, the people who work in presidential races can easily forget the basic rules of politics they learned when they started out as local political activists. In fact if you examine closely the inside workings of the Kerry campaign, as the editors of Newsweek did in the new book, ‘Election 2004’, it is clear that the people who called the shots for the Democratic presidential candidate made several basic mistakes they could have avoided if they had remembered what they learned in Campaign 101 back in the day.
John Kerry had the opportunity to beat George W. Bush. During the presidential campaign, a majority of American voters felt that the country was heading in the wrong direction and faulted the President for his handling of the economy and Iraq. Voters were searching for an alternative to re-electing the President but the Democratic candidate did not run a good enough campaign to take advantage of the political vacuum.
These are some of things that the Kerry campaign commanders should have learned in basic training. Don’t forget these rules when you run your own campaign:
1. Communicate a clear and consistent message
2. Persuade, don’t educate
3. Respond quickly to attacks
4. Run a tight ship with a clear chain of command
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Thursday, January 13, 2005
By Brad Bannon
Because of declines in urban tax bases and the increasing demand to provide city services to needy populations, mayors are always on the hot seat and face a unique set of pressures. For this reason, mayoral campaigns are increasingly competitive. Polling in mayoral contests also present a unique set of challenges which are worthy of treatment that you might not get attention in a general discussion of polling techniques.
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The conventional wisdom about presidential nomination campaigns is almost always wrong. And the pundits’ dismissal of former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani’s bid for the Republican nomination will not improve their batting average. Even though Giuliani is way ahead of everybody in early primary polls, the experts are already writing Giuliani’s obituary.
Some of this spin is wishful thinking by Democrats who don’t want to face him in the general election. Other than Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), he is better known and more popular than anyone running for president, even Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). And Giuliani has a better chance than any other GOP candidate to turn blue states red. Depending on the Democratic presidential nominee, he could put into play states like New York, New Jersey and California that are normally off-limits to Republicans.
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