From Campaigns & Elections: Where do the most likely voters get their campaign news? Well it’s not late-night comedy shows or Twitter, that’s for sure. It’s actually newspapers. A whopping 80 percent of voters 35 and older are regular readers of newspapers in print or online. Yes, I said online. According to another national survey [...]
READ MORE »80 percent of voters 35 and older are regular readers of newspapers in print or online
Feb20
2012
Written by Chris Akins
2012
Written by Chris Akins
Brainstorming Is A Bad Idea
Feb20
2012
Written by Chris Akins
2012
Written by Chris Akins
From the Daily Dish: Jonah Lehrer examines group creativity. The article’s jumping-off point: Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.
READ MORE »Studies: Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From Venus
Feb07
2012
Written by Chris Akins
2012
Written by Chris Akins
From the National Journal: What kinds of questions and values statements provoke the sharpest divide between left and right? The team looked at responses to 107 questions and found that the most divisive questions included those in the following areas: 1) WAR, PEACE, VIOLENCE, EMPATHY WITH THE WORLD: On key questions and statements in this [...]
READ MORE »Campaign Yard Signs May Actually Help
Feb06
2012
Written by Chris Akins
2012
Written by Chris Akins
Andrew Sullivan neatly summarizes: Sasha Issenberg assembles evidence: Under some circumstances, they can motivate people to vote. Before New York City’s 2005 mayoral election, Fordham University professor Costas Panagopoulos decided to take his curiosity about the effectiveness of signs to the streets. In the only known randomized academic experiment on the subject, Panagopoulos matched 14 pairs of Manhattan [...]
READ MORE »If You’re Explaining, You’re Losing
Feb06
2012
Written by Chris Akins
2012
Written by Chris Akins
“I’m not concerned about the very poor.” Regardless of what Mitt Romney said after that all people heard was, “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” feeding into the stereotype Republicans have a tin ear to the needs of those less fortunate. And at the same time Romney handed a sledgehammer to Obama with which [...]
READ MORE »How to Implement a Successful Absentee Ballot Chase Program
Feb05
2012
Written by Chris Akins
2012
Written by Chris Akins
If there’s a lesson learned from the 2012 Florida Presidential Preference Primary it’s that 40% of the votes cast were done so before the actual January 31st election day by absentee ballots or early voting. What’s always interesting to me is how often absentee ballots and early voting overlooked to the detriment of the campaign. Absentee [...]
READ MORE »Twelve Kinds of Undecided Voters
Jan08
2012
Written by Chris Akins
2012
Written by Chris Akins
Slate writes: Campaigns know, for instance, that undecided voters are not all the same. Here are a dozen different types of self-described undecided voters, and how the Republican presidential candidates are dealing with them in the final days before the Iowa caucus. N.B.: Some voters likely fit into more than one category. 1. THE FUTURE [...]
READ MORE »Who Are The Undecided Voters?
Jan07
2012
Written by Chris Akins
2012
Written by Chris Akins
Andrew Sullivan writes: Many of them are apathetic: A large chunk of people decide late because they just don’t care about politics and tune it out for as long as they can. Tulane’s Brian Brox and the University of Arkansas-Little Rock’s Joseph Giammo examined the attributes of late deciders in presidential general elections and found that [...]
READ MORE »Why Negative Ads Work Even Better Now
Jan07
2012
Written by Chris Akins
2012
Written by Chris Akins
Taegan Goddard writes: Joe Klein notes that negative campaign ads “have been more effective and brutal this time because no one has to get up there at the end and say, ‘I’m Mitt Romney and I approved this message.’” “That line came in for a fair amount of mockery when the federal government began to require [...]
READ MORE »Why Women Vote Differently Than Men?
Jan07
2012
Written by Chris Akins
2012
Written by Chris Akins
Slate writes: Despite stereotypes, men are actually more fickle at the voting booth. … Women’s identification with the Democrats represented something different from, say, the movement of white Southerners en masse from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Rather, the gender gap amounted to a group developing distinct electoral preferences for the first time, and [...]
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