Thread by @dweitzel

I had a conversation about #Kurz and what his motivation might have been with regard to the faked polls. It was not clear to us what Team Kurz was thinking and why they might have taken the risk to use tax payer money to pay for faked polling results in a newspaper.

The institute that they used (Research Affairs) was extremely busy. Shown here are the number of polls that each firm published in Austria since Research Affairs was established in 2016.

Why do this?
We had two ideas:
1) The fake polls were done to prepare the ÖVP for takeover by Kurz. Low polling numbers should legitimize drastic change within the party and allow Team Kurz to gain full control. Once in power high polls insulate them from internal criticism.

2) The fake polls were designed to drive public opinion and influence the outcome of elections.

In order to see if there are patterns in the way Research Affairs was used I scraped the data and made some simple plots.

This graphs shows all available polling results between 2014 and 2019 (scraped from Wikipedia). Research Affairs (RA) polls are orange, all other firms are gray. The black line indicates Kurz takeover of the party, the gray lines are elections.

Interesting is that before Kurz gained control of the party the polling results for the ÖVP by Research Affairs were on average lower than those from other firms. After the take over Research Affairs immediately reported on average higher polls for the ÖVP.

Looking closer at the time between July 2016 and July 2018 we can see that Research Affairs really might have been used by Team Kurz against their own party. Closer to election date the results don't appear too far off from other firms.

However, throughout the entire time Research Affairs does sprinkle in polls that are significantly higher than their competitors (e.g. right after the 2017 election).

From the text messages we also know that they seem to have intended to use RA as a tool to influence public opinion. A more thorough analysis needs to be done but based on some quick EDA the real mission of RA might have been a tax payer funded takeover of the ÖVP.