And while Finnegan's wisdom has been earned from three decades of political trench-work, there's a new game in town that can make even the political novice have the wisdom of the electoral sage. It's called the SPEAR poll. It was widely derided, dismissed, mocked and ignored when the first one came out in October and it showed that the Prime Minister had a 20% approval rating. Well, looking at the result of the election now, maybe they weren't that far off. Today SPEAR's Executive Director Gus Pererra and one of the designers of the poll Yasmine Andrews came to our studios to tell us they feel vindicated.
Gus Pererra,
"The results of the elections show that the poll was a very accurate poll, it was very precise, very on target and the results do show that overall the poll had shown that when we asked the question if the elections were called back then how many would vote for the UDP, our poll said 65% would have voted for the UDP, the real results from March 1st said 61% did. Our poll back in October said that 34.5% would have voted for the PUP and the results of March 1st actually show that 35% did so we feel vindicated."
Yasmine Andrews,
"We were very confident that all the results of the poll would in effect be what has resulted on March 1st. When we are talking about the randomized sample we also have to employ what is called valid and reliable questions in your questionnaire. What we did is we tested that for reliability and validity and again that gave us the assurance that whatever results the poll gave, with all objectivity, would be accurate."
Jules Vasquez,
One of the central and most controversial findings of your poll is that the Prime Minister's approval rating was 19.5%.
Gus Pererra,
"Public relations and promotions says that you can influence perception and I think that they invested, I don't know, it must have been a lot of money, to try and reshape perception but the fact is that they did not address the reality and we feel that the current realities which had to do with the pain that the people were feeling, tax burdens, and the corruption, which again our second poll showed that uppermost in the voters mind were issues of poverty, corruption, and accountability. We feel that those came to the fore and those were the realities that no amount of advertising changed and we feel that that is something they did not deal with."
Yasmine Andrews,
"Polls save a lot of money, like you said. Instead of finding out what 282,000 people are saying in a census, you ask 300 and that is representing of the 200,000 and it also encourages what we call participatory democracy because you are hearing all these 280,000 people's voices at a very easy and inexpensive way so people should really try to come up with 2006 and realize that thee are ways of doing things much easier and much more efficient and things that will allow you to waste money on something you could have presented."
