MaxDiff for Message and Policy Testing

The Democratic ecosystem relies on a combination of polling, domain expertise, and message testing to develop effective messaging strategy. In order to run winning campaigns, Democrats need an efficient, resilient, and reliable measure of voter preferences across a variety of messages and policies. Over the course of Fall 2021, Priorities USA and Data for Progress worked to verify the efficacy of the MaxDiff (Best-Worst Scaling) question format for political-message testing.

Our research shows that MaxDiff is an effective and simple method of ranking messages, policies, or other discrete elements by capturing the preferences of voters implicitly without asking them to rank the elements themselves. The MaxDiff format works well against traditional measurement tactics like ordinal ranking, Likert scaling, and in-survey Randomized Control Trials (RCTs).

As the 2022 elections approach, movement and electoral partners need clear guidance on which messaging to use for certain issues. MaxDiff offers a powerful solution by answering the question: “If I have to talk about X, what should I say?”