We recently had the opportunity to apply market research and marketing analytics techniques doing some pro-bono work for a local political campaign. Apart from the satisfaction of being able to contribute our professional skills to a local cause we were enthusiastic about, this was a great example of how the availability of low-cost, online services are making analytics more and more available to a wider range of applications and budgets.
Situation
We faced an election for a village president and three village trustees. Often these races in this small town of 18,000 people are not even contested, but this year three candidates were running for the president position and five were running for the three trustee positions. We were working for four candidates who were running as a slate for the four open positions.
To our knowledge, formal voter polls and surveys had never been done in this community. Campaigns were shaped by candidates’ informal sense of the community and local issues and outcomes, while often easily guessed at, were not really known until election night.
However, the number of candidates in this election created some interesting campaign strategy questions and issues that led us to conduct a poll and analyze the data because the large number of candidate combinations voters could consider. Specifically:
