Municipal Polling: Is it Feasible?

Public opinion polling can provide information as to how different segments within the electorate view issues, parties, or candidates. Every year, political parties in Canada both federally and provincially spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on market research and public opinion related services to help shape their communication strategies and campaign platforms. When it comes to municipal politics, however, polling can be a trickier matter.

Poll after poll, Toronto's mayoral candidates in 2014 jockeyed for the lead as media outlets intensified their coverage and voters became more alive to the issues. But why is it that we hear about people's attitudes and opinions towards mayoral candidates but not City Council candidates? How hard could it be to ask residents of a certain area how they view their City Councillor?

It’s actually a lot harder than one would think, both in theory and practice.

One of the major problems with which the polling industry is grappling today is low response rates. Today's public has very little patience to participate in public opinion surveys and often confuse pollsters with telemarketers. It’s quite difficult for pollsters to find out what people are thinking when more and more of them are refusing to share their opinions. Twenty or thirty years ago pollsters could acquire a response from roughly six or even seven out of every ten households contacted. This meant that polling could be done relatively quickly and cost-effectively. Today some polls only receive responses from 2 out of every 100 households!

Almost every household had a land line or home phone, meaning that a vast majority of the population (especially voters) could be reached at home. Today, however, fewer and fewer households have land lines, making people harder to contact. Mobile devices or cell phones have begun (and will continue) to replace landlines as the most common means of contact. Furthermore, many households are becoming cell phone only households, especially among new Canadians and young Canadians ages 18-34. Pollsters today must adjust their sampling frames to accommodate the widespread and continuously growing use of mobile devices to avoid biases in their sampling. However, blending or mixing land lines and cell phones is not a simple task. The problems surrounding cell phone polling in a municipal context will become more evident once we take a look at the sample situation below:

Assume for the moment that I have a client who was running for Toronto City Council. My client has enough funds in their war chest to conduct an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) poll with a sample size of 500. With today's low response rates, it’s very plausible our hypothetical poll would receive a response rate in the very low single digits. Hypothetically, say I acquired a response rate of 3% (pretty reasonable for an IVR poll!). This means that, in theory, I would have dialed 16,666 phone numbers to get the 500 people needed to complete the survey. However, just because someone is willing to take the survey doesn't necessarily mean that they are eligible to vote. In this situation, eligibility to vote is what we would call our incidence rate or the rate at which we are actually talking to the people we need to be talking to. The incidence rate affects the logistics of the poll (and client's invoice) because 16,666 numbers had to be called in order to interview 500 eligible voters - not to mention the phone numbers purchased from a vender but were unable to produce a response because they were either out of service or belonged to a business.

Our problems aren't over yet. When it comes to using landlines, it’s possible for a pollster to isolate a geographic area by using the phone book. However, cell phones are not listed in the phone book so in Toronto it is not possible to narrow down a cell phone number to a specific section of the city before contacting it. A pollster can conduct a city-wide municipal poll for a mayoral candidate by incorporating cell phone numbers into their sampling frame with relatively little hassle because it is possible to purchase lists of mobile numbers but all you know about the number is that, if it’s a live number, it probably corresponds with individuals residing within the City of Toronto (some people may have a Toronto number but live outside of the city, but we can ignore this complication for our example). Conducting a municipal poll for a City Council candidate is quite difficult as we are not able to isolate cell-phone respondents who live within a specific ward within the city. Leaving out cell phone respondents could bias my sample and the results my client paid for would be skewed.

There are 44 wards in Toronto, so assuming that we wish to have 15% of our sample consist of cell phones that means we need 75 cell phone respondents, and assuming our 3% response rate, that means if we knew only the cell phones for our ward we would need to contact 2500 individuals. But we have a second problem, roughly 1 out of every 44 people that agrees to do our survey will live in the ward we want so to get those 75 respondents we will actually need to contact 110,000 cell phone numbers. And here’s one more caveat, cell phone number lists often also include numbers that are not connected – that is they are assigned to be a cell phone number, but no one has purchased that specific number yet, so we will need even to call even more than 110,000 numbers! This would be both time consuming and quite expensive for my client.

For these reasons it is important for municipal candidates to understand that they are uniquely situated within the world of electoral politics and public opinion. They face a set of challenges that their mayoral colleagues do not and they need to take these obstacles into account if they are serious about conducting market research.