Originally posted by: smashp
Originally posted by: Train
ya but what are we supposed to keep ourselves occupied with til then?
You never hung out in the DC forum have you? he he, Stats!
Politicians use statistics like a drunk uses a lightpost
For support rather than enlightenment.
only if the poll is in thier favor, right? You wouldnt want to use a poll for "support" when it shows the other guy winning.
If you cant see the importance of polls, I hope you dont go into business for yourself (or run one for someone else). Polls are basically the political extension of Market research. Big companies spend MILLIONS, (and some even spend Billions) on market research every year. You participate in market research every day and most of the time you dont even know it. Hell just loading this webpage adds to a statistic somewhere that someone will put into graphs and reports and compare with other graphs and reports, etc, thats market research.
If you have a grocery store "preferred shopper" card, they take the info tied to your card (your address, age, gender, etc) and then link it to all your receipts. Thats market research, from those databases they can determine by linking the sale of pet food to addresses of the card holders where the concentrations of pet owners are. And companies like Purina pay big bucks for that information. If your ad budget says you can only afford to run one puppy-chow commercial, would you run it in a town where the avg dog ownership is 20% or in a town where the avg dog ownership is 50%? If you bothered to look at the research, you'd know where to effectively spend your money, without it your just taking blind guesses.
Companies that ignore the pulse of the market fail, and companies that are agile enough to adjust with the research are usually successful.