comrades,

dear great leader takes a break from revolutionary work to help the proletariat clarify the obfuscations being bandied about in the wordwide web about surveys.

social weather stations and pulse asia, inc. have recently released the results of their respective january 2013 pre-election surveys. understandably, a number of candidates for the senate have raised a howl, claiming that these surveys condition the public mind and set trends that eventually affect the result of the elections.

are they correct?

according to the oracle of wikipedia (and yes, revolutionaries are wont to consult oracles as well, nevermind how tragic the greeks ended up), "an opinion poll is asurvey of public opinion from a particular sample. opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population by conducting a series of questions and then extrapolating generalities into ratio or within confidence intervals." whew.

put more simply, a survey is akin to taking a spoonful of the broth of public sentiment in order to know how it tastes. as dear great leader's polsci 199 professor pepe miranda constantly reiterated, one does not need to consume the whole pot to know if the stew is delicious.

is it important to know how the stew tastes? dear great leader believes that the answer is an unequivocal, if at times cautious, yes. a candidate will find it invaluable to know how he is fairing in particular communities (not just the geographic kind, mind you). this will help him either consolidate his gains or strategize to try to catch up with his opponents. alternatively, and taking our stew metaphor a bit further, this will help the candidate determine if it's better to just turn off the stove altogether and order out. there are delicious ramen places everywhere!

for the electorate, surveys helps them relay to candidates the issues that are important to them. you will recall, comrades, how the overwhelming public support for the rh bill forced the legislators to get over their squeamishness in supporting the devil. although, if true that vox populi vox dei, then the cbcp would be guilty of turning deaf ears to the almighty's entreaties with their stance against the rh bill.

but i digress. the point is, on the whole, pre-election surveys do a lot of good.

as to the question of trending, i understand that there have been studies that showed that the issue of creating a trend for or against candidates is real. i understand however, from the wisdom of the web aggregated by google, that this trending has not been conclusively proven.

dear great leader believes that this trending conundrum can be shown up by casting it into a chicken-or-egg situation:

"is my polling on the upswing because i am becoming more popular or am i becoming more popular because my polling is on the upswing?" 

put this way, dear great leader believes you, comrades, know the answer.

viva la revolucion!
dear great leader