I'm proud to be a member of the Market Research Council and even prouder of their new program series, which is projecting deep intelligence into the marketplace like a firehose.
In an hour last week, the MR Council hosted two presentations about the midterm election, one on the media spend, presented by ADImpact CEO Kyle Roberts, and the other on the mood of the nation, by top pollsters Peter Hart and Jeffrey Horwitt, Founder and Partner of Hart Research respectively.
Kyle, who has made ADImpact the leading BI company in the political field, showed that both parties are each spending about $4.5 billion for the midterms, with most of it in television, specifically spot TV.
Peter and Jeffrey presented a comprehensive, definitive analysis of the polarity which they show to be widening, and how each issue is affected. In the slide below, you can see that Americans place personal money worries above preserving democracy as issues affecting whom they are going to vote for. The most troubling stat on the slide is that only about 20% of non-Democrats consider the democracy to be one of the two most important issues, and even among Democrats, only 38% consider the democracy to be one of the top two issues. How can it be that, besides Democrats, four out of five Americans don't consider democracy to be one of the two most important issues?