Field research is not a photograph. Precise, useful, indispensable, and silent. It won't tell you why the man in the frame looks sad. There's a second instrument for that explanation, and campaigns skip it like clockwork. This installment of  How It Actually Works  is about polling and focus groups and about why a campaign that runs only one of the two knows it's bleeding but can't find the wound. “Like any serious party, we do research, and it says…” A sentence that in politics means roughly everything and nothing. So worn out that nobody believes it anymore. Not even the people on the ballot. Picture a campaign team that has just received the latest poll. The slides are up. Party rating, candidate rating, the opponent's numbers, and three questions on the big issues. The researchers open the deck, everyone nods along, pretending to study it closely, and somebody says, “Well, it's not that bad.” The party leader holds up to the slide with his own rating, then d...

For years and year, in different countries, various continents, I have been conducting researches and I have been showing them to the politicians. Most often, as a firs slide they ask for political party rating, and as a second they want politician ratings – and that is what mostly what their interest is. Honestly, some of them look in which way does the country go and eventually the problems. They go through all other matchings and follow-up slides with a phone in their hands or with the “hurry up – why are you bothering me with this… “ look in their eyes. When we talk about rating of political parties there are only two reactions of the politicians: our rating is great and this research is not good at all, we have more for sure . In Serbia, BiH, East Africa (not in Bulgaria, which is interesting) bad ratings, provided by the researchers is usually followed up by the sentence: they have never guessed … This is why I was interested in how   accurate were the researches f...