Ah, which is what I just said.

Went to the crossroads, fell down on mah knees
Went to the crossroads, fell down on mah knees
Make Keb’ mah new Boss Man, oh Lawdy Lawdy please.

Blind Boy Mushroom.

It is the same with polling companies.After the next election, who is more likely to get big bucks from the ALP (or any party) to conduct its focus groups? Company A, which in 2007 stacked all its focus groups with Howard-haters only to see the Coalition returned with an increased majority. Or Company B, whose focus groups throughout 2007 kept telling Rudd and labor they suck?

That’s nonsense, John. No one “stacks” focus groups. They’re testing messages and themes for resonance and trying to understand the process of opinion dissemination and formation. Focus groups are conducted for quite different reasons than polling or other types of quant political research. And parties are going to hire firms that deliver the best results – Newspoll, etc, aren’t really in that game. The qualitative political researchers tend to be politically aligned to greater or lesser degree – ie Crosby Textor – but they have to be, in essence, because they’re privy to very sensitive information about campaigns and strategies.

Qualitative research aims at finding how people form their opinions, how they frame them and how best to mobilise these opinions and prejudices in ways favourable to the client, whether that is a political party or someone selling time-shares.

The pure gold of focus groups is formulations such as “of course Mr Howard is a very clever politician”.

For all we know, first person to say that in a focus group may have been a rusted on Lib.

However, this statement may have been rephrased and imported with different, more negative, meanings in the course of the conversation among focus group participants.

Accute convenors of focus groups latch onto those verbalisations and use them to drive whole campaigns, as we have seen already with the “clever” crack.

I am not saying that anyone is less or more worthy just that when evaluating political opinions of the swinging voters it is more useful if you start by screening out lib or lab voters as we know what they will say when asked to evaluate either their party or the opposition party prospective electoral material.

The other thing is that when participants are paid they might have been asked the question how will you vote in 2007 and answer i don’t know or i’m undecided getting them in to the survey group it is hard to be truthful about your electoral habits when there is an envelope of cash on offer.

John G exactly my point there is no point in this kind of exercise.

Also fiasco this is not about sampling the electorate it was about evaluating electoral material and messages etc.

Indeed. It is the same with accusations of bias against the ABC. I think the ABC is biased, but not in a party political sense. They are biased towards luvviedom.

Does anybody seriously think that Fran Kelly, Kerry O’Brien, Virginia Trioli, Stephen Crittenden, Tony Jones, etc. would not love to tear an incompetent lying ALP Minister to shreds? Of course they would! These people are all highly paid experienced, very bright and AMBITIOUS. There is no way they would knock back an opportunity to gain serious professional kudos just because they happen to be a die-hard Greens or Labor voter.

It is the same with polling companies.After the next election, who is more likely to get big bucks from the ALP (or any party) to conduct its focus groups? Company A, which in 2007 stacked all its focus groups with Howard-haters only to see the Coalition returned with an increased majority. Or Company B, whose focus groups throughout 2007 kept telling Rudd and labor they suck?

I do not know anything about political focus groups

Quite so, John.
The more of the population you artificially exclude from your sample group, the less accurate a reflection of the electorate it is. If a pollster wanted to thoroughly discredit themselves, they’d do as much tinkering with their samples as they could.
I don’t know where this myth has come from that somehow people with set political beliefs—such as loving or hating John Howard—have somehow a lesser part of authentic ‘swinging’ public opinion.

I do not know anything about political focus groups, but surely it would be in any party’s best interest to have as unbiased a sample of participants as possible.

They do not hold these expensive focus groups for propaganda purposes: they really want to know exactly what people are thinking.

There is nothing to be gained by stacking the groups with Howard-haters if out there in the electorates, only 2% (or whatever) are Howard Haters.

How good is the selection if that can occur?

You seem to have identified a constituency of the ‘converted’ who lie statistically outside the rest of the voting population and whose opinions must be artificially separated from some more genuine electorate for polling accuracy. That’s the only explanation I can think of for that bizarre comment. You do realise that ‘swinging’ voters only get the same franchise as the fanatical, right?
Once, there was a dream that was an Australian electorate—you could only whisper it…</russ>

WIth his current polling, they’ll play ball on IR. Now, I’ve always Rudd should have reintroduced the no-disadvantange clause, and just watched AWAs slowly die everywhere (but boom sectors, which have no problem going above award). But I can sympathise with tearing it all up, so Ruddster, do remind those sectors about common law individual contracts, and set beefed up minimum conditions regulating their use. You cant prevent common law contracts being used, so might as well embrace them as an above award measure, and publicise it.

Elsewhere, lo and behold!! Ratty on the road to Damascus discovers and wonderful land called “industry policy”. A belated convert to niche manufacturing!! Blimey!

This is a plain admission of the gigantic holes in his economic management record, for the future. I expect and hope Rudd will drive a flottilla of tanks through that gap shortly.