The city’s new system of ranked-choice voting, along with a crowded field of Democrats, has complicated efforts to do comprehensive voter surveys.
Much of the focus of the New York City mayoral race has centered on one or two perceived front-runners: Andrew Yang, the 2020 presidential candidate, and Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president.
But that perception is almost entirely based on what has been an unusually quiet polling season. None of the three major public pollsters in the New York City region have done comprehensive surveys in the mayor’s race.
And of those big three pollsters — Quinnipiac University Poll, Marist College Institute for Public Opinion and Siena College Research Institute — two have no intention of conducting any such polls before the June 22 Democratic primary. At this point in 2013, the three pollsters had together put out more than a dozen independent horse-race polls on the Democratic primary.
This year, New York voters will have to continue to rely on polls from outfits with less of a New York track record, or on surveys released by parties with possibly ulterior motives, including mayoral campaigns and special interest groups.
The dearth of independent polls has a lot to do with what is arguably the biggest unknown in the race for mayor (aside from who the ultimate victor will be): how exactly the city’s new system of ranked-choice voting will affect voter behavior.
For the first time in a mayoral primary, city voters will be able to rank up to five candidates in order of preference. When the Board of Elections begins tabulating the results, if no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes, all votes for the lowest-performing candidate will be eliminated, and those voters’ second-choice picks will be counted instead. The cycle continues until one winner remains.
It is unclear how well-acquainted voters are with the new system, or how they will behave once they get into the voting booth. Will they in fact rank up to five candidates, or just vote for the one they prefer? Will they even be familiar enough with the candidates to rank five of them?
“The reason we haven’t seen a lot of quality polling is the ranked-order voting,” said Lee Miringoff, the director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. “There isn’t a whole lot of track record as to the behavior voters are likely to pursue once they get into the voting booth.”
Don Levy, director of the Siena College Research Institute, and Doug Schwartz, the associate vice president of the Quinnipiac University Poll, offered similar views on the challenges posed by ranked-choice voting.
“We worried about how hard it would be to be accurate,” Mr. Levy said.
They voiced other concerns, too. Primaries are typically low-turnout affairs, which makes it hard for pollsters to find “likely voters” to survey. Voters are only just beginning to pay attention to the race. And many are presumably unaware that the primary will be in June, instead of September, as it has been in the past.
“If you just think of the arithmetic of doing polling, if it’s harder to find people who are ‘likely,’ you’re going to do lots and lots of phone calls,” Mr. Levy said. “It’s going to be more expensive. It takes more time. Instead of being able to do it in three polling days, it takes six or seven.”
The ballot also has 13 Democratic candidates for mayor, and it is hard for pollsters to go through the whole list and then gather voters’ second, third, fourth and fifth choices without the participant hanging up the phone.
All of those considerations make polling the race in a comprehensive way “friggin’ expensive,” said Neil Newhouse, partner and co-founder of Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm out of Virginia that surveyed the mayor’s race — including all of the ranked-choice voting tabulations — for Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York.
In the poll, Mr. Yang received the most votes in the first round, but in the end, Mr. Adams triumphed.
“It’s not predictive,” Mr. Newhouse said. “It is the classic snapshot in time.”
Six weeks before the 2013 primary election, the polls suggested that Bill de Blasio, then the city’s public advocate, was still trailing City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who was long presumed to be the front-runner, and running neck-and-neck with William C. Thompson, the former New York City comptroller.
But then the polls began to indicate something surprising: a Mr. de Blasio surge. In the final stretch, the polls showed Mr. de Blasio gaining on Ms. Quinn, outflanking Mr. Thompson and ultimately winning the race.
“Christine Quinn was going to win, then Anthony Weiner was a player, Thompson was a safe choice and then bang — all of a sudden there’s de Blasio,” Mr. Levy said.
The mayor’s race of 2021 is lacking much of that dramatic flair, and the absence of much independent public polling is not the only reason.
The pandemic has kept voters and candidates on video forums for much of the campaign. It has limited opportunities for the candidates and their issues to enter everyday discussion. But the lack of trusted public polling has left close observers without the sort of information they are accustomed to.
“I’m a fairly sophisticated observer and I don’t know what the hell is going on with any degree of confidence,” said Doug Muzzio, a professor of Public Affairs at Baruch College.
Independent polling can serve an important purpose, by informing the public and journalists of the relative strength of the candidates, and the influence that events have on their standing.
They can also serve a practical purpose for campaigns. Though campaigns have their own internal polling, more credible-seeming public polling can be useful in convincing reluctant donors that a candidate is in fact viable. It can also draw favorable media attention and boost campaign-worker morale.
Siena did do one poll in conjunction with AARP that asked respondents who were 50 and older three questions pitting the Democratic candidates against each other. Marist is slated to do a poll to determine who can participate in the June 16 debate, yet it remains unclear if there will be horse-race questions, or just issue-based questions, said Mr. Miringoff, the director.
“It’s going to be very difficult, if we do it,” Mr. Miringoff added.
In the absence of much polling, New Yorkers have been left to cite polls from campaigns, special interest groups, and up-and-coming polling houses, whose polling methods make some traditionalists skittish.
Emerson College Polling, out of Boston, has done two polls in the race for mayor, and is expected to soon release a third.
Mr. Levy, of the Siena poll, said that Emerson has a “growing track record” and is “worth taking seriously.” But he also raised concerns about Emerson’s reliance on online panels of registered voters and its use of text messaging.
“The plus side of texting is people look at their texts,” Mr. Levy said. “But are you going to hit a link in a text that you’re not familiar with?”
Spencer Kimball, the director of Emerson College Polling, defended the approach, suggesting that it was “the future of polling.”
According to Mr. Kimball, more than 90 percent of American adults have a cellphone, while only half the population has a landline. To rule out modern communication methods is to cancel out a significant, and growing, part of the voting population, he said.
“These folks that are using the live operators, that’s great,” Mr. Kimball said. “That’s $35,000 a survey and it’s not perfect.”
Not every member of the political class is mourning the absence of robust public polling in the election.
Mr. Levy said he and “every pollster” he knows is frustrated by the media’s comparative attention to horse-race polling, and the relative inattention to polls they do the rest of the year, which focus on how participants feel about different issues.
“I like pre-election polling that at least touches on what issues are most salient to voters at the same time,” he said.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
