Senate Polling Discussion and Analysis
Written by Monkey
Introduction: Written by Monkey
Recently Monkey’s Musings conducted a poll to see the electorate’s preference on senatorial candidates. We choose to release the ideological leaning of the candidates to help support our predictions, but chose to keep the results of the preliminary poll hidden to be released after the election in an attempt to analyze the effectiveness of election polling. Here, we will discuss the change in voting behavior over three separate polls, my poll, the poll released by the ENN, and lastly the election itself.
Recap:
If you missed the last published article that analyzed platforms and released predictions based on candidates, you can read that here. However, I will provide a brief recap of the final conclusions here for the sake of convenience. We determined that the electorate was looking for a candidate that met the following criteria. I also will be assigning points to whether each of these candidates met the specified criteria in their platform.
- Someone experienced with previous senatorial experience (44 percent)
- Ervald, GraVandius, Isaris
- Someone that shares their beliefs about the remerge (48 percent)
- Not applicable
- Someone who supports the current senate’s work and will build upon it, while ensuring that it gets passed in a timely manner (64 percent)
- SkyGreen, GraVandius, Ervald, Mr. Verteger, Darkslayer
- Someone who supports some kind of blanket raise in confirmation (68 percent combined)
- Verteger, Forilian, Darkslayer, SkyGreen, Ervald, GraVandius
- Someone who thinks that the raise should be applied to all executive appointments (60 percent)
- GraVandius, Verteger, Isaris
- Someone who believes the Vice President should not be required to serve in a ministry (52 percent)
- GraVandius, Verteger, Forilian, SkyGreen, Isaris
- Someone who believes that radio should not be altered (56 percent)
- Forilian, SkyGreen
Total ‘favorable’ point values:
- Darkslayer: 2
- Ervald:3
- Forilian: 3
- GraVandius:5
- Isaris: 3
- Mr. Verteger: 4
- SkyGreen24: 4
In the last article, we stated that the election was essentially determined by the current reform discussion, and there is a high likelihood that voters will be looking to vote for candidates that shared their stances regarding reform. If we were to make general assumptions about the poll and candidate’s platform and purely based the electoral odds on how the platform matched up to the electorate’s view, we would have seen the following outcome:
- GraVandius (wins seat)
- Mr. Verteger or SkyGreen24 (wins seat)
- Forilian, Ervald, and Isaris (tie)
- Darkslayer
However, in our last article, I came to the conclusion that due to the length of the ongoing modernization discussion, it’s unlikely that the sole factor for election will be platform, and I believed that the experience behind a candidate is likely to play a very important part as well. I believed that this would actually be the main factor that affected how the region voted, and I assigned each candidate into subgroups, which are listed below. The candidates are ranked from most likely to win to least likely to win in each category.
Frontrunner: Gravandius
Contender: Ervald, Verteger
Long Shot: Izzy, Darkslayer, Forilian, SkyGreen
Obviously, we know by now that the election itself did not match any of the projects, with the most notable upset of frontrunner and leading candidate GraVandius not winning either seat. Before we head to the numbers, let’s look at what happened in between the initial article and the election in terms of candidate platform activity.
Platform Activity
Frontrunner GraV seemed to have a generally quiet platform, with some notable Europeians such as Aex, Sopo, and Prim considering their platforms. There didn’t seem to be much involvement, possibly due to the fact that many in the region already considered him a lock-in for the seat and had no further questions for this candidate.
I would say candidate Forilian had a relatively quiet platform as well, with some Europeians supporting him for getting involved so quickly, while Sopo raised the hint that his platform may seem somewhat hesitant in developing firm stances.
Verteger’s platform seemed to be a little more tumultuous, with long-standing citizens such as HEM, Sopo, and Lethen posing concerns over Verteger’s reputation for being somewhat of a joke candidate. However, Verteger managed to alleviate some of these concerns through his responses, and it seems like many of the voters were satisfied by his responses, but Verteger did not seem to receive any of the explicit vote pledges that some other candidates received, so it’s unsure if these voters were satisfied enough by his replies that they were comfortable enough to cast a vote for him come election day.
Candidate Izzy also had a relatively quiet platform with limited comments, with the only negative comment coming from Sopo, who remarked that he would be unable to cast a vote for Izzy because of their opposition to reform. There was limited questions based on Izzy’s platform or stances.
SkyGreen had some comments from Maowi and Sopo questioning his unorthodox proposal of implementing a 61.8 percent confirmation threshold over the more commonly proposed 66 percent or 75 percent. Interestingly, SkyGreen24 received somewhat of an aggressive line of questioning from another candidate, Forilian. With those two candidates perhaps seen as the more unlikelier newcomer candidates, I’m led to wonder if Forilian had a strategic motivation in mind to employ a pretty tough back and forth between another candidate.
Candidate Ervald had a more active platform discussion, with it reaching 3 pages compared to 1 by some of the other candidates. Ervald released periodic updates to his platform based on stances by other candidates, as well as faced a pretty harsh line of questioning by Forilian as well, as well as a harsh rebuke by HEM. Forilian seemed to latch on to Ervald’s stance regarding requiring a Vice President to serve in a ministry, which was one of the topics I identified as possibly being a major factor separating Ervald from the rest of the candidates, due to the fact that it may be a more black and white stance, rather than an issue that can be compromised. HEM also questioned Ervald for his past action in refusing to be an advisor for a World Assembly nominee. Ervald responded to both of these comments, and seemed to make it out of both lines of questioning relatively intact, garnering support from citizens’ such as Maowi, Calvin, Prim, and UPC. Overall, I would say Ervald might have had the most discussed platform, with critiques coming from several figures as well as himself adding new stances and clarifications to his platform throughout the standing period.
Darkslayer’s platform to me seemed very interesting, especially since he may have been the newcomer that was poised to have a chance to win a seat, despite my earlier predictions. Dark fielded questions from Aex, Maowi, and Forilian, but in the process, managed to gain the formal endorsement of HEM and Sopo. Sopo, who was a former senator before he resigned, even came back on the day of the election to once again reiterate his support for candidate Darkslayer, going as far as to change his discord username in a show of support. I believe the action of older Europeians going to bat for Darkslayer and officially endorsing his candidacy had a major effect in propelling him forward in the race.
It’s clear that this was a very contentious election, with many heated discussions and some difficult choices to make. Many Europeians remarked that this time around, all of the candidates seemed like good options and were qualified, but ultimately it most likely came down to personal preferences. Election day was tense as well, with over 53 voters casting votes in the by-election, and frequent discussion in the discord when one candidate inched ahead of another. The next section of my article will focus on the quantitative numbers behind the polling and election.
Polling
Above are the never-before-seen results of the first poll conducted by Monkey’s musings. As you can see above, the electorate strongly voted for GraVandius, with Darkslayer coming in at second place. Candidate’s Ervald and Verteger saw a good share of support as well, with Izzy, Forilian, and SkyGreen24 seeing a small number of votes. At this point, the results are more or less what I expected, with the notable exception of Darkslayer seeing such a high amount of support. This is already a deviation from my previously predicted results, where I assumed that senatorial experience would take preference over specific stances. The next poll was a poll conducted by the E News Network, which received a slight reduction in votes.
You can see here that Ervald and Isaris both experienced a jump in support, with Ervald perhaps reaping more advantages from the increase as it propelled him to second place. Other candidates saw a minor decrease in support, with Darkslayer falling 6 percentage points to third place. Interestingly, this was closer to how I ordered the candidates based on my predictions. I don’t want to say that I had a direct hand in shaping the electorate, but the results from this poll are interesting to say the least, and I would look for future research to see how public endorsements or coverage may affect votes. I would say that the status quo is upheld generally for the most part by this benchmark poll. Without knowing the results of the first poll, I would say that there’s already some assumptions that can be made here. First of all, it seems unlikely that Forilian, Izzy, Mr. Verteger, and SkyGreen will win seats. They all have less than half the votes held by the leading 2 candidates. I would also say that at this point, second place, or even both seats, are anyone’s game. The gap of four votes is something that can be easily made up. If I was GraVandius, I might be feeling pretty confident after winning this poll and knowing that I’m the frontrunner, but perhaps the gap of only one vote between Ervald and GraVandius might be worrying to who will exactly win first place.
Lastly, we have the election itself, which was won by Ervald and Darkslayer, after 94 votes were cast. It looks like Ervald saw a slight decrease in votes, but still managed to come out in first place. Darkslayer saw a small increase in votes to propel him to second place. Other notable increases include Forilian, which saw a 6 percent increase in votes, but it wasn’t enough to win him a seat. Most notably, candidate GraVandius saw a 8.5 percent decrease in votes, moving him down from 1st place to 3rd place, enough to see him not win a seat in the by election. GraVandius only lost the second seat by one vote, and he later remarked that it was one of his most bitter defeats, as he was actively involved in the modernization discussion, and had the senatorial experience needed, which may have led many to think he was a clear frontrunner.
So, what are my thoughts regarding polls? You can see that no candidate managed to stay in the top 3 in all three ‘polls’, with them fighting for various places. I do think that the polls did a good job of predicting who would be the contenders. I initially thought that GraV, Ervald, and Vert should have a strong chance of winning the seats, and the first poll proved me wrong, showing that GraV, Dark, and Ervald were the real contenders, and in that regard, I think that they were more accurate than my intuition. I think that polls do a good job of separating the strong from the weak, but they don’t do the best job of predicting who will be the ultimate winner, especially when they are only separated by a couple of votes and candidates can go and try to get out the vote, or seek endorsements.
Here’s the change over time map of all the candidates over each poll. You can see the general trend reflected in each line. I don’t have many thoughts on this, but I will say that I wonder what would have occurred if I had released my poll results from the beginning. You can see that most candidates remained somewhat stable between the first two polls before there was more movement between the second and third poll. I don’t know if any of these small changes would have triggered any warning bells in any of the candidates. It’s possible that someone like Ervald might have become more confident after that jump, or perhaps Darkslayer would have started reaching out to get out the vote after noticing a drop, but I wonder if the slight drop for someone like GraVandius would have shaken him up enough to perhaps be more proactive in the election. It’s also pretty clear that you can see a break between the top 3 fighting for the two spots versus the rest of the candidates, so there’s that.
Lastly, my wonderful colleague @Lime recently published his own coverage tracking shifts in votes over the course of the election, it's a fantastic article and has plenty of insightful commentary, and I would encourage you to check it out if you haven’t already. I was planning on using some of the data here, but I think he’s done an excellent job of describing the campaigns over the election period, and anything I would say would be superfluous.
Final Thoughts
This was a very exciting election, and it’s undoubtedly going to be remembered for a while. Congratulations to Darkslayer and Ervald, our new senators that will play an instrumental part in the reform process. I am sure that in the future, polls will be looked at with a more critical mindset, and I think that strategic voting, GOTV campaigns, and blind elections are all topics that will be revisited in the near future. With the massive increase in the number of voters as well as some of the jumps that occurred in the real election, I would wager that there was some behind the scenes campaigning done. I’d also be interested to hear how candidates, and even the general populace, viewed the polls. Did it affect your campaign? Were you motivated to increase voter outreach? When was the point where you felt maybe worried about winning a seat? I think that these answers could play a big part in how we saw this election go down, and they surely played a big part during this election.
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