What do poll forecasters make during elections?

Three months before the Bihar assembly elections, research companies pitched battle plans, offering several services — including pre and post-poll surveys — to help political parties with winning strategies. But the real challenge was to get the account of a particular political party, which is rumoured to have spent over Rs 100 crore in these elections that were held in five phases.

Though none of the eight major political parties revealed the names of the agencies they hired for internal assessments, it is said that the largest party eventually hired at least two marketing research firms for conducting internal surveys, campaign management, perception management for both candidates and party, constituency analysis, identifying influential people, booth-wise caste analysis and exit surveys.

So how much money did these two agencies make from the Rs 100-crore kitty? Experts say it is difficult to arrive at any number, but one can make an estimate depending on the sample size for predicting the mood of the voters. For instance, the cost to sample one person ranges between Rs 140 and Rs 400. “It varies agency to agency and their relationships with the party,” says an insider currently working for a political party. “Since parties want to understand the broad trend, sample sizes are kept between 20,000 and 50,000, depending on the size of the state and number of assemblies,” the insider explained. Calculations suggest that surveys for a sample size of 30,000 voters at Rs 200 per voter would cost around Rs 60 lakh.  

These agencies also offer individual candidates  qualitative and quantitative analyses of their respective constituencies. “Deals are struck anywhere between Rs 10 lakh and Rs 20 lakh, depending on the duration of the election. And most of the time, money is paid in cash,” said the person, who has provided similar services during state elections and the Lok Sabha elections last year.

There are also marketing research firms such as CVoter, CICERO, Nielsen and Today’s Chanakya that news channels and newspapers engage for conducting pre- and exit-poll surveys. “Costs depend on how much the firm has invested in research, skill development and analytics development,” said Yashwant Deshmukh of CVoter.

While CVoter claims to not work with political parties, it has annual contracts with news organisations. Its clients included Times of India, BBC, Reuters, Bloomberg, India TV, Loksabha TV and Zee News. Besides these, CVoter has worked in countries such as Indonesia for evaluating disaster mitigation.