The Ten Dollar Political Survey
New technology has made surveying cheap, easy, and fast. I am conducting monthly political surveys
using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. I provide a payment of five cents for each response, so I am able to
survey 200 participants for the incredibly low cost of $10.
I surveyed 200 participants in January and another 200 in February 2012. Both survey periods were for
one week. I retained participants who said that they would “probably” or “definitely” vote in the 2012
general election and who passed a simple validation test. Then I weighted the sample so that the political
party representation would be consistent with the distribution found by the Rasmussen Reports: 35.9%
Republican, 32.5% Democrat, 31.6% Independent.
Sample Characteristics
Here are the characteristics of the weighted sample:
N = 314
Mean age = 35.
Median family income: $50-64K
Median education: Bachelor’s degree
Gender: 50% Female, 50% Male
Selections for President
Support for Obama remained unchanged, while support for Paul nearly doubled.
Sentiment
Over a series of polls, I developed a three-factor measure of political sentiment.
The three factors measured are:
Inspires Passion: This measures how willing the voter is to make sacrifices to secure the
candidate's election including working for the campaign and donating money.
Inspires Confidence: This measures the degree to which the voter views the candidate as
competent: intelligent and able to lead the country in the right direction.
Inspires Loyalty: This measures whether the voter is committed to the candidate and would
be difficult to sway to vote for another choice.
Mean ratings on these three dimensions are shown for voters’ first choice. Santorum and Ron Paul
were viewed as most capable by their supporters. Obama and Paul supporters were the most loyal.
Paul supporters also indicated that they were most likely to actively support their candidate through
contributions or campaign work.
