The May 2020 Mark Penn/Stagwell- Noticias SIN poll says that none of the three leading presidential candidates are likely to get enough votes to win on election day. Mark Penn has said 39% will vote for Luis Abinader of the Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM), 37% for Gonzalo Castillo of the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD), and 10% for Leonel Fernández of the People’s Force in the 5 July presidential election. This means a second round will be necessary. It is scheduled for Sunday, 26 May 2020.
In the second round vote, the findings of the poll indicate 46% will vote for Abinader and 42% for Castillo. Of the 10% that say they will vote for Fernández in the first round, half of these will vote for Leonel, and only 35% for Castillo.
Bernardo Vega, representative of Mark Penn/Stagwell in the Dominican Republic, says that Abinader has most of his followers among men and young voters. Castillo is popular with women and the older voters.
Among the others findings of the poll is that Dominican voters are more concerned about the possibility of dying from Covid-19 than about not having money to bring food home. 67% said health is more important, only 27% gave priority to the difficult economic situation.
Another finding is that the perception is that PLD presidential candidate Gonzalo Castillo has done better than the PRM’s Luis Abinader regarding his actions to fight the Covid-19. Castillo on this issue got 58% of voters, and Abinader received only 22% and Fernández 4%.
Vega announced another Mark Penn/Stagwell poll for 26 June 2020, days before the 5 July election.
1,020 persons were polled from 20-25 May 2020 this time around. The poll is the first telephone poll to be carried out by Mark Penn in the Dominican Republic.
In an earlier face to face poll in April 2020, Vega had spoken out against telephone polls. Back then, he strongly stated that polls had to be face to face because there was no readily available big data source in the Dominican Republic. But with the advance of Covid-19, a way would have to be found.
Vega explained that the Washington, D.C.-based polling experts advanced against doing a face to face poll because those who would be polling could be inadvertently spreading the disease. And people would be reticent to talk to the pollsters.
To find a way around the lack of big data, Vega said that Mark Penn asked if the telecom companies could supply telephone numbers in the chosen areas. “And they asked if the voting list was a public document,” said Vega. “And I got it for them.”
He explained that working from the Washington, D.C. office, Mark Penn took the names from the voters list and crosschecked them with the telecom company lists. This convinced them they had a good sample of the people who were likely to vote. “We will know if the sample was good on 5 July,” he said. Mark Penn has a good track record in accurate forecasting with face to face polls in the past.
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30 May 2020