Modern polling has been converted by the 24 hour news cycle into a mechanism to generate news stories that serve the political needs of poll sponsors. Unfortunately, most of these arcane polls are kind of expensive to produce and don't always give the kind of detailed information that might answer the original questions the poll sponsors had in mind. So, whats a poor Libertarian to do?

Here are Bludgeon & Skewer we believe we have a retro concept called Mobile Polling Groups that are the answer. With the MPG concept, you don't need massive arrays of autodialers, celebrity voiceovers or any of the other intrusive telephone crap that micro targeted, automated telephone polling requires. All you need are 3 questions, two volunteers and a mapquest generated list of gas stations in the zip code of interest. People love to talk, people love to pontificate on matters of political concern and the MPG process allows them to do that while contributing important data that will help all of us understand the mood of the country. With robo polling there is a stated question and a selection of responses typically ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. No finesse there. No imagination either. No recognition that there are many grades and variants of opinion, many subtle nuances on one question that might modify the response to the next question. Most importantly, with robo polling there is no human interaction and no possibilty that hand gestures might lead to a verbal altercation.

Some adherents of robo polling go so far as to claim that it is more accurate than talking to a fellow human being about politics because there is no real communication going on at all. The idea that people would prefer to bear their political souls to a recorded voice on the other end of a phone line is puzzling to me at best, and realistically sounds more like an evasion on the part of the various and sundry polling outfits currently using that model in business. It is undeniably cheaper to turn on the phone bank and process 1500 random robo calls than to get out and do the footwork needed for person to person contact, but is the result of these operations worth anything? More importantly, is that operation feeding dedicated american workers families or adding another Mercedes to the fleet in the owners garage? Shouldn't the millions of dollars poured into the top ten polling companies used by the entrenched  Democrat and Republican career politicians be spread around to hundreds of boots on the ground poll takers instead of being concentrated into the hands of 10 small robo call companies?

The MPG concept for political polling will produce better data for political operations by virtue of it's human to human collection system. The human pollster will be able to gather data and details the robo call cannot even begin to sense, much less record and the resulting product will have a richness that is hard to put a price on.

Here at Bludgeon and Skewer we've conducted several MPG operations since the Tea Parties last week and here are the results!

Middle of the road survey:

Question 1
    Do you think the USA on the right track or the wrong track?
        Que? 23%
        What? 22%
        Huh? 17%
        We're going to hell in a handbasket! 38%

Question 2
    What do you think of President Obama?
        Que?  23%
        Who? 22%
        Huh?  17%
        Hey pal, I'm just tryin' to buy some freakin' gas! 38%

Question 3
    What do you think of the US Congress?
        Que? 23%
        Who? 22%
        Huh? 17%
        Your Mother! 38%

 

Left-O-Sphere Bias survey:

 

Question 1