by OnSight | Mar 2017 | Elections, politics, Polling, Trends
A new statewide poll of 503 active voters shows a majority of Coloradans give high marks to their home state and its Democratic governor, and have strong reservations about President Donald Trump and many of the polices and issues put forward during his first 50 days in office.
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Keating Research is recognized by Democrats and Republicans alike as providing extremely accurate polling in Colorado.
The Keating/OnSight poll provides informative, accurate results using live-interviewer telephone (cell and landline) surveys and was Colorado’s most accurate in the 2016 Presidential election, predicting Hillary Clinton would win the state by 5 points in Colorado.
What follows are highlights are from the new Keating/OnSight Colorado statewide poll conducted March 8-13, 2017:
Voters are optimistic about the direction of state and Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper
By nearly 2-to-1, Colorado voters say the state is heading in the right direction (58% right direction – 32% wrong direction), which is certainly a reflection of their positive feelings toward Colorado’s second-term Governor, John Hickenlooper. By roughly the same margin, Colorado voters are favorable toward Hickenlooper (57% favorable – 33% unfavorable).
President Donald Trump is not well-liked
Donald Trump, who lost Colorado to Hillary Clinton (43% to 48%), remains unpopular in Colorado (43% favorable – 55% unfavorable), including 45% of respondents who hold a “very unfavorable” view toward him. Opinions of Trump are distorted by voters’ partisan lenses – Democrats strongly dislike Trump (12% favorable – 87% unfavorable) and Republicans very much like him (83% favorable – 16% unfavorable), while the key voting block of unaffiliated voters are hostile territory for Trump (32% favorable – 64% unfavorable).
Trump’s presidency has gotten off to a decidedly rocky start, as nearly 5-of-10 Colorado voters think he is doing a lousy job: grading his performance with an F (38%) or D (10%). A minority of respondents – 36% – give Trump an A (19%) or B (17%).
Honesty is a key characteristic for any politician, and a majority – 52% – of Colorado voters think President Trump is “dishonest and tells lies”, while a minority – 40% – think he is “honest and tells the truth.” Suburban voters show a decided lack of confidence in Trump – a majority (55%) of voters in the five suburban counties of Arapahoe, Adams, Jefferson, Douglas and Broomfield say Trump is “dishonest and tells lies.”
Trump’s problems are dragging down Colorado Republican Sen. Cory Gardner
Currently, Colorado voters are divided on Sen. Cory Gardner (39% favorable – 38% unfavorable), compared to a more positive opinion of him before Trump was elected in July, 2016 (45% favorable – 28% unfavorable).
Colorado’s Democratic U.S. Senator Michael Bennet remains popular with 51% viewing him favorably compared to 29% unfavorable, which is the same as before Trump was elected in July, 2016 (51% favorable – 28% unfavorable).
Colorado voters disagree with what President Trump is saying about the media and President Obama
- A majority – 62% – of Colorado voters do not believe that President Obama had the wires tapped in Trump Tower, while 20% believe it.
- A majority – 57% – of Colorado voters disagree with President Trump’s statement that the news media is the enemy of the people, while 37% agree with it.
President Trump’s anti-immigrant positions are out of step with Colorado
- A majority – 60% -– of Colorado voters oppose President Trump’s plan to build a wall on the Mexican border to keep out illegal immigrants, while 35% support the idea. Trump’s wall is opposed by a majority of men (53% oppose) and women (67% oppose), younger age 18-49 (71% oppose) and older age 50+ (51% oppose), and white (59% oppose) and Hispanics (70% oppose).
- A majority — 53% – of Colorado voters oppose Trump’s travel ban that prevents citizens from Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from entering the United States, while 42% support Trump’s new travel ban. Trump’s travel ban is particularly disliked by millennial voters age 18-34 (76% oppose the travel ban), while those age 65+ are supportive (56% support).
Colorado voters aren’t convinced Trump’s campaign communicated with Russia to influence outcome of the election
- 37% of Colorado voters believe Donald Trump’s campaign was in communication with Russia in order to influence the Presidential election, while nearly half (47%) say they were not, and 16% are unsure.
Colorado voters don’t want to repeal Obamacare
When asked about the Obamacare replacement plan recently released by Republicans in Congress, by a 13-point margin Colorado voters prefer to keep Obamacare (54%) rather than repeal Obamacare (41%). Attitudes toward Obamacare closely mirror the Presidential election – Clinton voters prefer to keep Obamacare (91%) and Trump voters prefer to repeal Obamacare (84%).
Colorado Voters want to increase the share of energy that comes from clean, renewable sources
8-of-10 voters say they favor increasing the share of Colorado’s energy that comes from clean, renewable sources like wind and solar power in order to create jobs and economic opportunity in rural Colorado, while only 14% oppose it. Increasing clean, renewable energy is a pure non-partisan issue, favored overwhelmingly by Democrats (95% favor), Unaffiliated (84% favor) and by two-thirds of Republicans.
Keating Research is recognized by Democrats and Republicans alike as providing extremely accurate polling in Colorado.
This polling data is based on 503 live-interviewer telephone surveys conducted March 8-13, 2017 among “active” voters statewide in Colorado. For this sample of 503 interviews the worst case margin of error at the 95% level is plus or minus 4.4%. Respondents were chosen at random from a list of voters with phone numbers: 261 surveys (52%) were conducted on cell-phone and 242 surveys (48%) were conducted on a land line.
by OnSight | Feb 2016 | Branding, Campaign, Graphics, politics, Trends
From Jeb! to Hillary, this campaign season is bringing us a crop of new campaign logos to admire and to scorn.
Bright colors, corporate vibes, and a trend towards first-name-only branding define the direction of this batch.
The flexible graphic identity from Obama’s 2008 campaign is now regarded as archetypal political design. The combination of a bright primary-color palette, the sunrise O and bold typography implied a confident candidate with a clear vision for the future. Whether President Obama could ever live up to this image, his campaign’s savvy and powerful use of design set the bar for today’s presidential candidates. While none of 2016’s campaigns rise to the level of Obama 2008, some intriguing ideas and shared visual themes have emerged from the field.
Read more analysis at Washington Post.
by OnSight | Feb 2015 | Trends
The office has been bustling for the last few days: our neighbors at Industry have been hosting 10.10.10 Denver, a gathering of entrepreneurial CEOs who have convened to solve big problems. In their own words:
10.10.10 is ten big problems with significant market opportunity, ten prospective CEOs looking for their next big thing, and ten days together in Denver.
This year, the focus was on Health, Wellness and Healthcare Innovation. Participants listened to presentations from local experts, and then spent the next week collaborating to define problems and envision solutions.
Ultimately, the goal is to have the seeds of a startup or two start to germinate, and organizers and participants are hopeful that this year’s inaugural 10.10.10 event will catalyze just that.
Read more: 10.10.10 web site
by OnSight | Sep 2014 | politics, Press and Media, Social Media, Trends
Scads of small type. Truncated graphics. Unusable forms. Browser-crashing incompatibility.
On the right, a site not optimized for mobile — tiny, cut-off text, pics that have to be zoomed-in to see, and tiny, cluttered menu. On the right, clear navigation, mobile-friendly text, and clear calls to action.
There are people looking for you — wanting to learn more, wanting to volunteer or even donate to you campaign or cause. And more and more (maybe even up to 50% of the time) they’re using their mobile phones to do it.
Not sure if your web site is mobile-compatible? Don’t feel too terribly bad — turns out some of the major political campaigns are behind the curve, too.
From Politico:
A POLITICO analysis of mobile sites for about 40 competitive House and Senate races found that a majority were plagued with missed opportunities for campaigns trying to find volunteers, donors and voters. The no-nos range from clunky pages that frequently crashed or weren’t formatted properly to content that was just too tiny to read.
Another big problem often discouraged by some political consultants: multiple pages of navigation before a potential donor can hit the send button with their all-important credit card numbers.
…
Political operatives from both parties say they recognize mobile’s tantalizing possibilities. Still, many campaigns are cutting corners on the mobile front — ignoring pleas for fewer tabs or larger font sizes — even if the potential payoff could mean more votes or thousands of dollars in additional donations. They’re reluctant to shift limited budget dollars away from traditional TV ads, especially for innovations that have a short shelf life limited to this election season.
To digital campaign strategists, seeing the shortcomings on the mobile front makes little sense considering how Americans have come to obsessively use their phones as their primary source not just for daily communication but also for entertainment.
Most users don’t want to read lots of text online at all, and even less so on mobile. And most campaigns can’t spring for the coding and development for a full mobile site, custom forms, and the tools required for credit card processing.
That said, if people are looking for you on their phones — and they are — there’s no excuse for making sure they can find you.
The priorities:
1. Using web analytics, determine what portion of your audience is accessing your site via mobile.
2. Are there particular times of week or year when mobile usage spikes?
3. Is there particular content that mobile users access more than desktop users?
4. Can your donation form be simplified or otherwise optimized for mobile?
5. Homepage should always be legible in mobile!
All this information inform the urgency and priorities for building out mobile compatibility.
After tackling the minimum, you can further refine your mobile site with custom content for mobile pages (shorter, more tightly-drafted content and photos), custom graphics and features to more closely mimic your desktop-viewable web site, other bells and whistles to integrate with social and other mobile-friendly tools.
cover image from Flickr user /marcoarment
by OnSight | Apr 2014 | Campaign, Graphics, politics, Press and Media, Trends
They call it “The Eye”…
Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group — a global PR research and analysis firm — has been collecting campaign ads. And now that they’ve got 10 years worth (upwards of 50,000 ads from the federal, state, and local level), they’ve done something amazing with them.
This stunning (and initially kind of overwhelming) interactive graphic breaks down the ads by party, topic, race, and relative airtime. It’s a stunning piece of datavisualization, and it links to every single one of the ads it has tracked, providing not just a graphical representation of an almost ungraspable amount of data, but an actual live database of the component parts (in this case, each unique ad), as well.
In addition,
Filtered by “President” and “Taxes”.
What’s this a reflection of? A smaller battleground in 2012 meant those presidential ads aired across fewer markets, which held down occurrences. But beyond that, the 2012 Obama campaign targeted many of their ads more narrowly, keeping as many as 20 unique commercials on the air at any one time. Many 2012 presidential ads also aired for shorter periods of time than ads in previous races because they were produced to either drive, or take advantage of the news cycle—a growing trend for political ads.
by OnSight | Mar 2014 | Campaign, Press and Media, Strategy, Trends, Web Communications
“For political campaigns, reaching younger, more diverse, swing voters through live TV advertising alone is problematic.”
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It’s a multi-layered challenge for political campaigns: TV is still the best way to reach the biggest audience, but media markets don’t necessarily map on to Congressional districts. In a cash-conscious campaign (and aren’t they all?), spending money to advertise to people who can’t even vote on your issue or candidate is bitter pill. Add to that the declining TV audience (or, better put, the increase in non-TV audiences) and the growth of “micro-targeting” on social media, and it raises the question about how best to allocate advertising dollars to reach the most relevant audience.
WaPo goes into more depth in this March 15 article, citing a bipartisan research effort from earlier in the year:
Live TV isn’t going away; it’s just not as dominant as it once was. Seventy percent of those surveyed said they had watched live television in the previous week. But fully 30 percent said that, other than live sporting events, they had watched no live television in the previous week. For younger voters, it’s closer to 40 percent.
Video on demand, streaming, smartphones and tablets have changed viewing habits. In the past three years, according to the survey, the percentage of people watching streaming content — think “House of Cards” on Netflix — has roughly doubled, to 27 percent of the population. Viewing content on smartphones has about doubled to roughly the same percentage of users. Tablet viewing has jumped from 14 percent to 26 percent in less than two years.
These changes in viewing habits coincide with the dramatic growth in the prevalence of smartphones and tablets. Today, two-thirds of the population has a smartphone; more than half said they have a tablet.
The bottom line is the same, political campaign or consumer marketing campaign — reach the people most interested in or persuadable by your message, with the least waste. Or as put by Obama media advisor Jim Margolis, ““The objective is reaching voters where they are. Content is content and whether you see an ad or video on your iPad, your TV or on your smartphone, our job is to get in front of your eyeballs and get your attention. That means looking for gaps in TV penetration, and finding targets someplace else…to do it right requires more work and sophistication than when people were watching four local stations and we were bombing them . . . with ads. The advertising world has changed in powerful ways and reaching voters is more challenging than ever before”
