New City Council Poll

September 27, 2011 by DickH Posted in City Council 2 Comments

There are many ways that we measure the strength of candidates during a city council election. How many signs do we see? Or bumper stickers? Local radio station WCAP does a telephone poll the Saturday before the election. None of those are scientific or perhaps even accurate, but they give us something to talk about until the only poll that counts, the one on election day, takes place.

Besides the traditional sign-counting exercise, I’ve come up with something else for us to count: the number of YouTube views of a candidate. I’ve attended both council candidate forums held thus far (September 8 and September 21) and have video recorded the opening and closing remarks of all candidates who attended both and have posted these clips to my YouTube channel. One nice feature of YouTube is that it tells you how many times a certain clip has been viewed. I decided to compare the number of views of each candidate, combining the numbers for the great majority of candidates who attended both forums and then report the order of finish based on the number of YouTube views. The results follow, with the views of each video in parenthesis and the total number of views following the equal sign.

  1. Patrick Murphy (134+125) = 264
  2. Ed Kennedy (40+61) = 101
  3. John MacDonald (43+36) = 79
  4. Marty Lorrey (45+27) = 72
  5. Paul Belley (43+28) = 71
  6. Fred Doyle (63) = 63
  7. Corey Belanger (31+25) = 56
  8. (tie for 7) Vesna Nuon (37+19) = 56
  9. Rita Mercier (53) = 53
  10. Van Pech (24+23) = 47
  11. John Leahy (29+16) = 45
  12. (tie for 11) Armand Mercier (18+27) = 45
  13. Kevin Broderick (17+18) = 35
  14. Bill Martin (19+15) = 34
  15. Rodney Elliott (18+14) = 32
  16. Joe Mendonca (10+16) = 26
  17. Jim Milinazzo (21) = 21

So there you have my YouTube poll.  You can also access the clips on our “2011 City Council Election” page on this site (although I still have to add the links to the September 21 forum to that page).   In the meantime, you can find them all (and more) on my YouTube channel.

2 Responses to New City Council Poll

  1. Jack Mitchell says:

    One consideration of the lower views numbers for long term incumbents is that they are a known quantity to voters. I think we use these forums to judge the intangibles of the candidates more than we judge the specific policy answer.

    Voters need to imagine these folks in the Council Chamber, doing the work. As “the work” is fairly routine, voters will carry forward what they know of incumbents. The challengers need to project themselves in such a manner, that a majority of voters can firmly visualize them “doing the work.”

    Give a voter a solid snapshot of competency and collaboration, get a vote.

  2. Joe S says:

    Jack has a good point (people don’t search out the knowns), but Patrick Murphy is a far outlier to that premise. Is it because of the substance of his responses that people search out his clips?