[Parallex]

Pretty much 100% of the times politicians send out a "survey" they're not actually doing market research (they'd hire a market research firm to do it if that were the case).

It's virtually always something else... usually it's just comms put out in the form of a question "Candidate X likes to torture and kill puppies and kittens do you agree this is bad? Y/N". Sometimes it's campaign research rather then policy research meaning it's an attempt to discover what kinds of issues and framing you can use against your opponent that will resonate with voters, the last time he ran for mayor Farkas put out an online arena survay and I was going to answer it until it got to the submit section where in order to submit my answers I would have had to provide my name and contact info... no thank you... I'll be happy to tell you what I think about an issue but I'll pass on being a part of your datamining/list-building exercise so you can micro-target me and spam my e-mail and texts with messaging.

They're going to do this type of stuff anyways and the subject of any particular question is almost meaningless so I have no issue with him using the arena for it. I'd rather they just not send out things like this but they keep on doing it so I imagine they either have data that says it's effective or sending it out in the form of a question activates some kind of spending loophole. I mean heck the conservative party's love to send out mailers that are basically attack ads because they can bill those as "constituent communications" and offload the cost to taxpayers through their office budget rather then paying it out of party coffers like partisan political ads would. I'm not up on what municipal campaign spending and advertising rules are so I can't say for sure but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some kind of loophole.