Not Too Close for USC Students to Call
For good reason, many political observers considered yesterday’s race in L.A.’s 5th city council district too close to call. But not the students in my political science class at USC. After having them research all the candidates and issues in January, I asked them who they thought would be the top finisher in the March election. Almost two-thirds said David Vahedi. I disagreed. Foolishly in retrospect.
On February 23-25, the class and I fielded a survey of 406 likely voters. The top three finishers in the poll ended up being the top three finishers in the election (graph above). It was still a close race with a week to go (34 percent undecided), yet all but 5 students expected the top two finishers to be Vahedi and Paul Koretz. They were exactly right.
In addition to the trial heat, the students tested the issues that matter to voters in the 5th (note to observers: billboards isn’t high on the list). If Vahedi or Koretz want to talk to my class, I’m sure they could get some good advice.
Update (3/24/09): The Vahedi campaign saw the post above and came by our class yesterday. The Daily Trojan has the story.
April 14th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Your note to observers that billboards isn’t high on the list of issues that mattered to the 406 likely voters is fairly meaningless unless one also knows the questions that were asked, as well as the other issues discussed in the polling. You’d do your readers a service by providing this missing information.
April 14th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Thanks for your comment. We asked about billboards in a couple of different ways.
First, we asked whether voters wanted to go in the same direction as Councilmember Weiss or in a different direction on a list of 9 different issues. One of the issues we tested was “restricting the number and size of billboards in the district.” Twenty percent of voters said they wanted to go in the same direction as Weiss while 37 percent said they wanted to go in a different direction. There were 4 issues in which voters were even more likely to want to go in a different direction.
Then we asked about all the same issues in a battery asking how high a priority it should be for the next councilmember. Only 17 percent of voters said billboards should be the highest priority — 9th out of 9. The short version of the other questions (in descending order of priority) was reducing wasteful spending in city government, improving public education, keeping residents safe from gangs, listening to residents’ concerns, creating jobs, dealing with traffic, managing development and providing basic city services.
Finally, we asked whether voters felt favorable or unfavorable about “assembling a Citizen Inventory Committee to take inventory of the Fifth District’s billboards and to create tougher enforcement of illegal billboards.” Sixty-four percent of voters felt favorable about that proposal including 33 percent who felt very favorable.
I think it is very safe to say that among the voters who were likely to vote this past March, they were generally in favor of additional regulation of billboards but it was not their highest priority.
April 15th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Thanks for the added information, which is valuable for anyone who wants to think in some depth about the issue and not just rely on sound bites. However, the fact that only 17 per cent rated billboards as the issue of highest priority for the next councilmember doesn’t support a conclusion that it is an issue of minor importance to voters in CD5. I am the head of an anti-billboard advocacy organization, and I wouldn’t have rated it the highest priority, either, so one might conclude that the fact that 17 per cent put it at the top of the list is actually quite significant. But more information is needed before arriving at either conclusion. For instance, were respondents asked to rank the 9 issues on a descending level of priority? Or were they simply asked which one of the 9 should be the highest priority? And what were the percentages for each of the 9 issues?
April 29th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
[…] Pineda did respond on the website to a query about the way the poll was constructed. He says voters were given a list of nine […]