YouGov’s Post

When we recently practiced what we preach, and ran a customer satisfaction survey amongst our clients, we learnt that a lot don't know about our innovative in-house qualitative offerings. The below is one great example, using communities to really dig into the consumer and bring audiences to life for others to see. Communities also allow you to track respondents views and feelings over days / weeks / months, and not just 1-2 hours like focus groups or interviews. We can use this approach for purchase journeys, consumption diaries, comms testing and more! Check it out :-)

Qualitative research isn’t just focus groups and depth interviews, innovative methods are helping us add the consumer voice to quantitative numbers in new and exciting ways. The online community and video output our qualitative team at YouGov are creating for Sky News is a great example of how you can dig into the consumer psyche and bring audiences to life for others to see #YouGov #qualitativeresearch

Great article. The main takeaway is that simple pollster choice can cause the margin between the two candidates to vary by up to eight points. This shows that we may rely too heavily on polls, which often reflect pollsters’ decisions as much as voters’ views. Just relax and vote! #election2024 #polls

The Problems With Polls: Political polling, once hailed as a revolutionary tool for democracy, is facing a crisis of confidence amid high-profile failures and fundamental critiques. Data scientist G. Elliott Morris, Nate Silver's successor at FiveThirtyEight, has defended polling's relevance in a new book, arguing it remains crucial for revealing public opinion despite challenges like plummeting response rates and rising costs. But critics, including political scientist Lindsay Rogers and sociologist Leo Bogart, have long questioned polling's ability to capture the complexities of public sentiment, arguing it reduces nuanced political matters to simplistic yes/no questions and potentially records opinions that don't exist outside the survey context. Social media platforms, promising to transform democracy by facilitating constant public feedback, have further complicated the polling landscape. The story adds: Today that product remains overwhelmingly popular: polls saturate election coverage, turn politics into a spectator sport, and provide an illusion of control over complex, unpredictable, and fundamentally fickle social forces. That isn't to say that polls don't have uses beyond entertainment: they can be a great asset to campaigns, helping candidates refine their messages and target their resources; they can provide breakdowns of election results that are far more illuminating than the overall vote count; and they can give us a sense -- a vague and sometimes misleading sense -- of what 300 million people or more think about an issue. But, pace Morris, the time for celebrating polls as a bastion of democracy or as a means of bringing elites closer to voters is surely over. The polling industry continues to boom. Democracy isn't faring quite so well. Silicon Valley ultimately peddled the same feel-good story about democracy as the polling industry: that the powerful are unresponsive to the wider public because they cannot hear their voices, and if only they could hear them, then of course they would listen and act. The virtue of this diagnosis is that structural inequalities in wealth and power are left intact -- all that matters in democracy is that everyone has a voice, regardless of background. In a very narrow, technical sense, their innovations have made this a reality. But the result is a loud, opinionated, and impotent public sphere, coarsened by social and economic divisions and made all the more disillusioned by the discovery that, in politics, it takes more than a voice to be heard. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Problems With Polls: Political polling, once hailed as a revolutionary tool for democracy, is facing a crisis of confidence amid high-profile failures and fundamental critiques. Data scientist G. Elliott Morris, Nate Silver's successor at FiveThirtyEight, has defended polling's relevance in a new book, arguing it remains crucial for revealing public opinion despite challenges like plummeting response rates and rising costs. But critics, including political scientist Lindsay Rogers and sociologist Leo Bogart, have long questioned polling's ability to capture the complexities of public sentiment, arguing it reduces nuanced political matters to simplistic yes/no questions and potentially records opinions that don't exist outside the survey context. Social media platforms, promising to transform democracy by facilitating constant public feedback, have further complicated the polling landscape. The story adds: Today that product remains overwhelmingly popular: polls saturate election coverage, turn politics into a spectator sport, and provide an illusion of control over complex, unpredictable, and fundamentally fickle social forces. That isn't to say that polls don't have uses beyond entertainment: they can be a great asset to campaigns, helping candidates refine their messages and target their resources; they can provide breakdowns of election results that are far more illuminating than the overall vote count; and they can give us a sense -- a vague and sometimes misleading sense -- of what 300 million people or more think about an issue. But, pace Morris, the time for celebrating polls as a bastion of democracy or as a means of bringing elites closer to voters is surely over. The polling industry continues to boom. Democracy isn't faring quite so well. Silicon Valley ultimately peddled the same feel-good story about democracy as the polling industry: that the powerful are unresponsive to the wider public because they cannot hear their voices, and if only they could hear them, then of course they would listen and act. The virtue of this diagnosis is that structural inequalities in wealth and power are left intact -- all that matters in democracy is that everyone has a voice, regardless of background. In a very narrow, technical sense, their innovations have made this a reality. But the result is a loud, opinionated, and impotent public sphere, coarsened by social and economic divisions and made all the more disillusioned by the discovery that, in politics, it takes more than a voice to be heard. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Biden's Re-Election Challenges in PA: Economy, Voters, and Trump's Base #2024presidentialelection #bipartisanship #changingdemographics #climatechange #closeelection #economy #energizebase #factorsinfluencingvote. #healthcare #heavilycontested #JoeBidenreelectionchallenges #moderatevoters #Pennsylvaniabattlegroundstate #Pennsylvaniaelectorate #Trumpbaseofsupport #Trumppopulistmessage #votersperceptions #whiteworkingclassvoters

Biden's Re-Election Challenges in PA: Economy, Voters, and Trump's Base #2024presidentialelection #bipartisanship #changingdemographics #climatechange #closeelection #economy #energizebase #factorsinfluencingvote. #healthcare #heavilycontested #JoeBidenreelectionchallenges #moderatevoters #Pennsylvaniabattlegroundstate #Pennsylvaniaelectorate #Trumpbaseofsupport #Trumppopulistmessage #votersperceptions #whiteworkingclassvoters

According to the latest national NBC News poll the presidential race is tied at 49% for both candidates on the head to head ballot. A persistent 66% of voters say the country is off on the wrong track and Trump holds double digit advantages over Harris on handling inflation (+12) and immigration (+25). The data shows Republicans GOTV efforts have narrowed the early vote margin to a 8-pt Harris advantage, compared to Biden’s 28-pt advantage in the last NBC track of 2020. https://lnkd.in/eE2zzy4H

Democrats were confident heading into Election Night Tuesday. What went wrong? Well, a lot of things. Here's what my reporting has found: ➡️ Polling remains a blunt and highly imperfect tool for capturing a representative view of the electorate. The fact that polling data was so off-base in the 2024 cycle becomes less surprising when we examine the disparities in respondents. ➡️ Harris failed to overcome mounting economic grievances. Rising living costs remain a key concern for voters, despite recent interest rate cuts and low unemployment. In the end, prices are still higher than pre-pandemic levels (by around 21%), and voters feel that at the grocery store and at the gas pump. They tend to blame the current administration, despite the fact that inflation was a necessary means by which to mitigate the risk of recession post-pandemic. ➡️ Harris struggled to differentiate herself from Biden and his agenda (remember when she went on ABC's 'The View' and said she couldn't think of one thing she'd do differently than her predecessor in office?), leaving many voters seeking a break from the status quo. ➡️ Her campaign's focus on Trump as a threat to democracy fell flat – especially with swing voters, who were already familiar with the former President's controversial record and were instead looking for solutions to immediate issues in their lives. Experts suggest she should have outlined more tangible policy messages and plans. The only issue for which she shared a clear vision was abortion. Other hot-button issues, like immigration, economics and foreign policy remained poorly articulated. ➡️ The GOP has effectively rebranded itself as the working man's party. Harris' losses among historically Democratic constituencies – particularly Black, Latino, and working-class voters – underscores broader challenges for the party as it contemplates how to rebuild its base and address economic discontent. Read my full analysis for The Drum, which includes commentary from: Boston University associate professor emeritus and former political consultant Tobe Berkovitz; University at Buffalo associate professor of political science and expert in political comms Jacob Neiheisel; and MDW Communications' founder and political strategist Michael Worley. #election #electionnews #harriswalz #trumpvance #politicalcampaign #uselection #presidentialelection #harris2024 #kamala2024 #trump2024 #politics #uspolitics #advertising #media #marketing

Citing research from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, USA TODAY reports that that most states are lagging in registering young voters compared with November 2020. https://lnkd.in/eQpgDuUS MIT Political Science #thisismit #mitshass #mit #politicalscience #election2024