What If There Were Interviews With Voters Instead Of Polls?

With the Iowa Caucuses pending, the latest polling information says that none of the Democratic candidates are close to getting 50% of the votes.  Indeed, if the leader gets upwards of 30%, that will be a surprise.  From my point of view, the process of selection is very unsatisfying, but for reasons that I haven't seen expressed in pieces I read about the election.  (Recently that's not as many as four years ago, when I was better informed.  I don't have the oomph now to do that.)  So here, I'd like to bring up a set of questions that I'd like to see answered.  Each of these are addressed to an individual potential voter.

1.  Do you have a preferred candidate?
   1a.  If you answered yes, what is it that attracts you to that candidate?
   1b.  If you answered no, are there several candidates that you'd find acceptable and other candidates you'd find unacceptable?
      1bi.  Can you explain what puts a candidate in the acceptable group and what puts a candidate in the unacceptable group?
      1bii.  If you are currently undecided on these matters, do you have a sense of when you might decide?

2.  Might you change your mind about your preferences over the candidates or is your mind made up and you are confident it will stay that way till the election?
   2a.  If you answered that you might change your mind, what sort of additional information would cause that?
   2b.  If you answered that you are confident your preferences will stay fixed, why is that?

3.  Is there a single issue that you find most compelling for determining the candidate you should vote for?
   3a.  If you answered yes, can you say what that single issue is?
   3b.  If you answered no, is there a set of issues that taken together you would deem give the compelling reason to vote for a candidate?

4.  Where do you get your information about these matters?

5.  Do your friend's views of these matters, as expressed in social media, impact your own views?

* * * * *

This list of questions could probably be made longer.  My experience with focus groups doing ed tech type questioning is that you have to give a lot of leeway for the respondent to define what's going on.  I'm afraid that the polling doesn't do this.  Further, with many candidates in the race, the information you really want to get at doesn't emerge.

If preferences really were fixed already, then you'd certainly want to elicit the full preference ordering and not just the top of the list.  In contrast, if preferences are still being shaped, it would be very helpful to know the factors that would influence how the preferences are ultimately formed.