Target Point

Seeing is Remembering

Yesterday Andrew Sullivan highlighted an Ignite presentation by TargetPoint's Alex Lundry, in which he discusses the political power of data visualization.  

Sullivan was particularly taken by this quote from the presentation:

Vision is our most dominant sense. It takes up 50% of our brain’s resources. And despite the visual nature of text, pictures are actually a superior and more efficient delivery mechanism for information. In neurology, this is called the ‘pictorial superiority effect’ [...] If I present information to you orally, you’ll probably only remember about 10% 72 hours after exposure, but if I add a picture, recall soars to 65%. So we are hard-wired to find visualization more compelling than a spreadsheet, a speech of a memo.

You can see Lundry's full 5 minute talk below:

Public Opinion on OBL

Over at Pollster, Mark Blumenthal has a piece investigating the consequences of Osama Bin Laden's death on public opinion, where recent TargetPoint polling gets a mention: 

Republican pollster Alex Lundry tells The Huffington Post that a survey his firm conducted this past January showed that 80 percent of Americans favored capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, but only 16 percent said they thought it was likely to happen. "Clearly," Lundry says, the news is "a welcome surprise for the American public." Most "had effectively ruled out the possibility of ever seeing this day, despite desperately yearning for it," he added.

The data comes from our recent survey on the 2010 legislative agenda, in which we asked approval ratings and likelihood measures on a number of items, including "the capture or killing of Osama Bin Laden."  We found that Americans had become almost universally skeptical of the government's ability to deliver on this long held promise: in an identical 2008 TargetPoint survey 53% of voters said it was unlikely, and by 2010 that number had grown to 69%.  

An Independent Congress

This week Resurgent Republic released the results of their most recent poll of the American electorate, and TargetPoint is proud to have once again helped visualize their data in their Independent Congress microsite.  

Our challenge was to find a meaningful, and compelling way to visualize...

The State of The Tea Party

In today's Washington Times, Ralph Hallow looks at what the Tea Party's scaled back tax day activities say about the current state of the movement (link).  The political operatives and consultants interviewed for the article, including TargetPoint president Michael Meyers, agree that this definitely does not signify waning influence.  Instead:

The diminishing clatter of the tea party's cups is also the result of less trembling as the prospect of an all-Obama, all-the-time atmosphere appears a bit less threatening. "There are fewer tea party protests with less intensity because, with the GOP controlling the House, the fear about the worst elements of the Democrat's agenda has subsided," said Alexandria-based campaign consultant Michael Meyers.

For more insight into this, check out our study of the 2011 legislative agenda and our exit poll of Tax Day Tea Party rally attendees last year.

The 2011 Political Landscape

In mid-December TargetPoint went into the field with a deep dive study of voter expectations and attitudes for the 2011 legislative agenda.  We focused on four key research questions:

1. Has the ideological structure of the electorate changed given the fall's dramatic election?
2. How might the brand images of Republicans and Democrats have shifted given the new political landscape?
3. What are voters' hopes and fears for the 2011 legislative agenda?
4. What is the state of the 2012 presidential primary field?

To help us answer these questions we tried to take an approach that was a little different from most post-election surveys.  Some of the items we examined included...