Polls See Victory For Candidates That Didn’t Bombard Voters With Text Messages

“It was clearly a cathartic experience for some voters to specifically choose the ballots of those opposing the ones who basically harassed them.”

Jerusalem, October 30 – Israeli local elections taking place today throughout the country appear to bear out a simple truth, researchers have discovered, namely that voters prefer campaigns that do not involve a torrent of unsolicited texts, emails, flyers, or other media.

Exit polls of voters in municipal elections indicate the above as a chief factor in voters’ decisions, report the pollsters, who recorded thousands of instances in which those emerging from polling places launched into tirades about candidates wasting constituents’ precious time, battery life, and patience with messages that stand little to no chance of affecting the outcome.

“We measured a good bit of resentment on the part of voters today,” acknowledged G. Yafit, who runs a respected polling organization, “and judging from the earful we got from people who’d just voted, it wasn’t the economy, demographic issues, crime, health care, education, sanitation, or any of the other typical issues that generated all that bitterness. In some places the only reason some voters decided to vote the way they did was not so much for a particular candidate or party as against any candidate or party with overenthusiastic use of media to bombard people with their talking points and whatnot.”

“People are fed up with this nonsense,” concurred a spokesman for Geocartographia, another polling organization. “Things got so out of hand in some cases that folks were yelling at our representatives on the phone when we called to survey their opinions. When we spoke to people face-to-face after they voted, the resentment was still flowing. It was clearly a cathartic experience for some voters to specifically choose the ballots of those opposing the ones who basically harassed them. This could be a new trend.”

Analysts agreed, with caution. “I’m sure plenty of campaign managers will be monitoring this phenomenon,” predicted an operative for a major party who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Here in Israel, the culture tends to overdo things, and that’s noticeable in marketing, among other arenas. Campaigning is marketing, and a good number of would-be professionals simply haven’t considered that overdoing certain things will backfire. Look at concessions to the Palestinians, for example. Oslo wasn’t enough – they had to go evacuate Gaza, and that’s twice there’s been a strategic reward for terrorism. Once wasn’t enough.”

Late Tuesday, reports circulated that an initiative was afoot to collect all the promotional newspapers distributed in Jerusalem Sunday and Monday promoting mayoral candidate Yossi Deutsch and the Agudat Yisrael Party for city council, and to assemble the papers into an effigy of Deutsch to be burned in Safra Square.

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