Voting

Voting

BUS339:Market Research

February 25, 2013

Voting

When it comes to market research, there is perhaps no other company or group that does this as aggressively as the political parties. Republicans and Democrats both have their own systems for picking out the hard R’s, the soft R’s, the moderates, the soft D’s, and the hard D’s, and they aren’t about to share any of this data with each other. While on the ground level the individual candidates are doing all that they can to show up for pancakes breakfasts and chili dinners, those of us behind the scenes are crunching the latest poll numbers and seeing how many points that the candidate is either ahead or behind. At the end of the day, it becomes a numbers game, and those numbers are generated through cold calls, door to door questionnaires, and stats from the last election.

One of the groups that are of significant importance as of late would be the “18-26” age group. This group has not shown up consistently to vote in the past, but has recently helped to push President Obama into the White House for the second time with higher than normal numbers.(Chong, pg. 128) The importance of grabbing up this group of voters for either party is of the utmost importance. Full disclosure, I work for and operate within the Republican party, and so my own limitations as to how well I could collect the actual data (how I might form my questions and pressure for certain answers) in order to get the unbiased responses would definitely be of question. However, given that this would be a politically driven assignment to begin with, the party would more likely than not be ok with me asking biased questions if it were to help to push the voters opinion on a topic in one direction or another.

With that being said, that would make the data only so useful, and for the sake of this paper we’re going err on the side of unbiased opinion. Calls to help sway voter opinion have their place, but not in...