In the months leading up to the November presidential election, leaders of the new UTSA Center for Public Opinion Research say they plan to begin rolling out data from a new public policy polling operation.
The center plans to use students to help conduct phone surveys about the needs of San Antonio and Bexar County residents, as well as probe opinions on issues like school choice, job approval of local elected officials and the mood of the local electorate headed into major elections.
Leaders plan to conduct four to six periodic political polls this year, with results from the first one released sometime in February, ahead of the March 5 primary, according to Bryan Gervais, the center’s director and an associate professor in UTSA’s Department of Political Science and Geography.
Despite its explosive population growth and intriguing demographic profile, San Antonio has long gone without a nonpartisan public polling source, something that many other major cities have. The Bexar Facts-KSAT-San Antonio Report Poll aimed to address that gap in 2020, but conducted its last poll in early 2022.
“You look at a city like Houston, which is served by high-quality longitudinal studies like the Greater Houston Community Panel,” said Jon Taylor, chair of UTSA’s political science department. “Due to a lack of polling infrastructure here, organizations, agencies and researchers have had to rely on substandard survey practices to study San Antonio area residents. We want to change that.”
But effective public policy polling has grown increasingly expensive and labor-intensive in recent years, as fewer homes have landline telephones and more potential respondents screen unknown callers on their cell phones. Getting a representative sample size is difficult.
At a Texas Tribune Festival panel last fall, both Republican political consultant Karl Rove and Democratic consultant David Axelrod warned against relying on public polling conducted without the resources to be scientific.
“We could use the internet and all kinds of other [source-gathering tools], but there are lots of problems with doing anything other than dialing somebody up, cell phone or landline, and saying, ‘I’m calling you randomly. Would you answer some questions?'” said Rove, who estimated that a modern campaign poll costs more than $40,000.
While leaders from UTSA’s polling center acknowledge those challenges, they said they studied polling institutes housed in academic settings across the country to find the right approach to balance resources and effectiveness. They consider the University of New Hampshire’s survey center, which partners with CNN on election polling, to be an aspirational model.
UTSA’s center expects to train and employ roughly two dozen students who will help conduct live phone interviews for the polling — a best practice for methodology — in both English and Spanish. Some survey data will also be collected online, Gervais said.
Rather than using a randomly selected survey population, the center plans to create a panel of respondents that it can continue interviewing over time, saving both time and money.
“The panel will be crucial,” Gervais said. “It will enable us to provide samples and conduct polls at a fraction of the cost required for a standard survey, where you are recruiting respondents from scratch every time.”
Set up late last year, the UTSA Center for Public Opinion Research received start-up funds from the university, but ultimately must generate its own revenue.
Aside from the periodic political polling, the center will do some paid polling for government and business clients. For example, Gervais said, if the county wanted to survey residents about emergency preparedness, the center could provide that kind of data. The center will not take on political campaigns as clients.
Data on San Antonio and Bexar County residents is also valuable on a national level, Gervais said, which could also help the center compete for grants. He pointed to U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert L. Santos‘ assessment of San Antonio at City Fest in November, when Santos called the city and state “a microcosm of America’s future.”
“That’s something we absolutely believe, that studying San Antonio and Bexar County is worthwhile because there’s a lot we can extract from it,” said Gervais. “It’s not just about understanding the local community, it’s understanding the United States and where it’s going over the next couple of decades.”
The polling center has an advisory board that includes former U.S. Rep. Charlie Gonzalez; Councilman Manny Pelaez (D8); Alanna Reed, director of communications and engagement for the City of San Antonio; and Robert Rivard, co-founder of the San Antonio Report and a driving force behind the Bexar Facts poll.
The board is tasked with assessing the center’s effectiveness and advising on research themes but won’t be involved in the development of polling instruments or analysis of the data, Reed said.
