Polling Memo: Effectiveness of Working California's IE in Controller's Race

The campaign that Working Californians was most heavily involved in during 2006 was the Controller race between right-wing Tony Strickland and John Chiang, who was sworn in yesterday. Our independent expenditure campaign, thanks to the support of a diverse list of sponsoring organizations, used a variety of methods including radio ads and direct mail helped carry Chiang to victory. But how effective were we?

The pollster we worked with on this campaign, David Binder Research has done some analysis of our targeting. He writes:

While Chiang ended up winning the contest by approximately 870,000 votes, an examination of the returns shows that his margin was greatest in the same demographic groups and geographic areas that were targeted by the Working Californians independent expenditure.

Final election returns show that Chiang defeated Strickland by a total of 871,702 votes out of approximately 8.4 million votes cast in this race. Despite many pundits predicting a very close race, or even a Strickland victory, Chiang won the contest by a margin of over 10%.

Pre-Election Polling

We did our homework before launching our IEs to figure out the best allocation of our resources. DBR was in the field in during the first and last week in October.

The results showed a race that was still in doubt. In fact, the tracking poll that finished October 30th, one week before election day, showed Chiang with only a 4% lead, which was within the surveys margin of error.

The tracking survey also showed an extremely high number of undecideds, as many voters had not yet focused on this contest.

Additionally, the pre-election surveys found several areas of weakness for Chiang. Specifically, the pre-election polls showed Chiang lagging among Democratic and independent voters, obtaining only 63% of support from Democrats and 31% support from independent and minor party voters.

Further, the pre-election polls indicated that Chiang was underperforming in two major media markets: Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. The October 30th tracking poll showed that only 46% of San Francisco Bay Area voters stated they would vote for Chiang, and only 33% of Los Angeles County voters.

Given this information, the independent expenditure committee decided to target these media markets with radio advertisements and also targeted key demographic groups with direct mail.

Results in Targeted Markets

Election day results show that the two markets targeted by our IE for radio advertisements provided Chiang the margin of victory. Together, Chaing won these two areas by 1.1 million votes.

That adds up to a 17% increase in the Bay area and a 25% gain in Los Angeles.

Binder concludes:

It was appropriate to target these two areas given that each has a proportion of Democratic voters. However, the pre-election polls showed that many Democrats in these areas were unaware of Chiang and were undecided on whether to support him or not. It is highly probable that the radio advertising and direct mail was an essential ingredient to bringing these voters back home for Chiang, which provided him the margin of victory on election day.

This will hopefully be the first of many campaigns where we deploy similar research techniques to inform our expenditures. After everything is said and done, we can share with you exactly why we do those things we do, with posts like this one. As much as I like blogging about polling, we can't exactly be sharing our secrets with the whole world in the midst of a campaign.

We will however, be sharing as much research as possible. One of our chief goals is to ensure public debate is informed by quality research and a clear-eyed understanding of the electorate.