And why didn't I hear about this earlier?
I know I don't see all the news that fits or even most of it. But I did read a lot about the Iranian presidential campaign in the last month.However, I never read a reference to The Center for Public Opinion's poll of Iranian voters. All I recall, especially from the past couple weeks, are reports about how the challenger to President Ahmadinejad was gaining popularity and had a real chance to defeat the incumbent.
I was skeptical and suspicious that the Western reporters were spending too much time hanging out with those Iranians who spoke English and not spending enough time with the masses. This survey suggests that, for whatever reasons, the journalists were misled.
The authors of this op-ed piece are identified by the Washington Post as "Ken Ballen... president of Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion, a nonprofit institute that researches attitudes toward extremism and Patrick Doherty... deputy director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. The groups' May 11-20 polling consisted of 1,001 interviews across Iran and had a 3.1 percentage point margin of error."
The Iranian People Speak
The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.
While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead...
The breadth of Ahmadinejad's support was apparent in our preelection survey. During the campaign, for instance, Mousavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Mousavi.
Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.
The only demographic groups in which our survey found Mousavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians... Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that the vote is not the product of widespread fraud...
Labels: elections, Iran, political culture
posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:10 AM
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