Poll, poll, everywhere a poll – it seems as though during the Presidential elections there are more polls taken than at any other time. The news media has a field day, especially when there is at least one or more candidates that skew just a little off center. This year the media and poll takers are blessed with an abundance of potential targets – on the ‘right’ we have Trump, Cruz and Marco Rubio and on the ‘left’ we have Hillary and Bernie. Daily polls are taken to determine the most viable candidates – their popularity, their trustworthiness and their popularity…in other words, which one is most electable, comes November. Thank heavens this only happens every four years.
While corporations aren’t candidates, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and NBC News had a survey done to see just how Google and Apple would stack up if they were running against the candidates for president and the findings may surprise you. They surveyed 1200 registered voters – 48-percent male and 52-percent female – and asked the question do you have a positive or negative opinion about both the candidates and the companies, Google and Apple. The pollsters then took the positive results, subtracted the negative results to arrive at our ‘net feelings.’ It turns out that Google received the highest ‘net’ rating of 63 – much higher than second place Apple at 40 and triple the rating of the highest rated candidate, John Kasich at only 19.
The ‘net’ ratings quickly go downhill from there – Bernie Sanders follows Kasich with only a 7 rating, followed by President Obama at 4. The reason they are so low is that while they have 43 and 47 positive ratings respectively, they also had almost as many distracters. The following negative ratings mean that more people had a negative view than positive view of the candidate. Marco Rubio comes in a -11 rating, Hillary Clinton is -13, Ted Cruz comes in at -18, Mitt Romney (not sure why he is there) is at -22 and good old Donald Trump comes in at a whopping -39. Trump had a 25-percent positive rating and a 64-percent negative rating – the highest negative rating of any candidate, with Hillary next at 51-percent negative rating. Of the negative votes cast for the companies, Apple had a 14-percent negative rating while Google only received a 4-percent negative rating. Google could possibly use its newfound popularity to help structure bills or laws regarding their self-driving cars or other projects they are working on. Could this mean an upswing in the popularity of Android devices, specifically their Google Nexus devices? Whatever they do, one thing is for certain – if the Presidential election was a popularity contest…it looks like Google would be the winner.