The Anti-Corruption Foundation’s sociology team continues to provide you with honest, high-quality polling.
We present the results of a poll on the upcoming St. Petersburg gubernatorial election.
Method: a telephone survey of St. Petersburg residents aged 18 and older with permanent registration, based on a random sample of mobile and landline phone numbers, conducted June 16–20, 2014. The margin of error does not exceed 3.8%.
Remarkably, even after two weeks, 20% of St. Petersburg residents do not even know that the governor has resigned and that a new election will be held. Perhaps this reflects the Kremlin’s desire to hold the election with minimal media coverage and minimal turnout.
This is where it gets very interesting. You and I understand why Poltavchenko wants an early election. We understand that the whole thing is a trick and a petty scam. Ordinary St. Petersburg residents, however, do not yet see it that way. We ask them how they feel about the resignation. Positive or somewhat positive — 34.7%. “Excellent,” they say, “he’s resigning — very good, let him go.”
As usual, respondents tend to overestimate both their electoral intentions and their ability to follow through. We will definitely conduct several more polls in St. Petersburg and track residents’ willingness to take part in the election.
We ran into some difficulties with the question about voting preferences, since there is still no clear list of candidates. Poltavchenko and Dmitrieva had announced their intention to take part in the election, while representatives of other parties had not done so at the time the poll was prepared — though we had our suspicions about some of them.
To handle this situation properly, we included the names of all possible candidates in the poll, sometimes more than one from the same party. In total, that gave us 9 names. To avoid “unaccounted-for votes” from respondents who could not choose a single representative of a party (for example, Yabloko had three possible contenders in our list: Yavlinsky, Artemyev, and Vishnevsky), interviewers had the option to mark “for any representative of the Yabloko party.” In the end, 4 candidates (Nilov, Artemyev, Sukhenko, and Vishnevsky) received a combined 2.3%, so during processing we placed them in the “other candidates” category (which also included Matviyenko, Vorobyov, Shoigu, and Pac-Man). The order in which the names were read out was randomized each time.
Our brief comment, not claiming to be scientific: Oksana Dmitrieva is starting from a strong position — 13.6% — while Georgy Poltavchenko is approved by 39% of respondents. As empirical experience, common sense, and, for example, the shifts in polling during the Moscow mayoral campaign suggest, the candidate representing the “authorities” starts from a maximum position but then steadily loses support. These kinds of polls always capture the “upper limit,” whereas the opposition challenger has every opportunity to grow (especially with 35% still undecided).
A first-round victory for Poltavchenko looks likely under only one condition: if Dmitrieva is barred from the election. If she is allowed to run and conducts an active campaign, she could easily win the votes of a significant share of the undecided electorate. In that case, a runoff is all but certain, and victory in the second round looks realistic.
Dmitrieva’s key task is to become the genuine representative of the city’s entire opposition — not just its “systemic” wing (whose support, as you can see, is minimal), but all of it. That is no simple task, given the difficult and long history of relations within the St. Petersburg opposition. Everyone has fallen out a hundred times, then made deals, then betrayed and deceived each other, then made deals again, then betrayed each other again. What is needed here is some kind of fundamental agreement — one that will be believed not by the negotiators themselves, but by the broader opposition activist community.
Vedomosti today reports that the Communists will, after all, nominate their own candidate. He has no real chance, but this will of course create problems with the municipal filter (the requirement to collect signatures from municipal deputies to qualify).
We will definitely continue following developments in St. Petersburg, and we will conduct another poll after the candidates are officially registered and again immediately before the election.
Thanks to everyone who helped us: Kolya, Misha, Polina, Sergei, Katya, Elena, Nikita, Tanya, Igor, Yegor, Svetlana, Roma, Karina, Dima, Ivan, Irina, Irina, Ivan, Tamara, Oksana, Lena, Nikolai, Adilya, Ruslan, Lidiya, Dmitry, Olga, Viktoria, Inna, Sonya, Tatyana, and especially Galya Koposova. And of course, none of this would have been possible without the head of our sociology department — Anna Biryukova.
If you would like to help us conduct polls and sign up for the ACF sociology team, you can always do so here: http://team.fbk.info/#form/sociology
Finally, one wild idea that occurred to us: if we are conducting polls in Novosibirsk, St. Petersburg, or Moscow, why not conduct one in Donetsk or Luhansk Oblast (regions of eastern Ukraine) as well? There are technical challenges involved in working with the phone database, but we are looking into them. There is also a trust issue: the poll results may please no one. Perhaps that could be addressed by inviting observers or making full recordings of all interviews and then publishing them. In short, we are thinking about it. If anyone has a brilliant idea, write to us.