Navalny and his attorney writing and tweeting in the courtroom; Navalny complained that his cell phone battery was running out, and the judge ordered people to turn off cell phones anyway. Photo by RAPSI. h/t @Agonych
Are journalists missing the story about Navalny's rise in the polls?
When anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was jocularly live-Tweeting his own doom yesterday from a courtroom in Korov (where nobody was surprised he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment), he interrupted the stream of condolences and his own hipster social media bravado (y so serius) to tell us some good news.
"Let's talk about something good," he tweeted. "Did you see KOMCON has noted the growth in ratings for Moscow? 14%. Next is Mitrokhin with 4%. By 08.09 we will have 146%"
He meant that according to Comcon's poll, he had 14% support and Mitrokhin, the Yabloko candidate had only 4%.
Navalny then cited an article in lenta.ru which talked about the latest poll findings about approval ratings for Moscow's mayor elections, scheduled for September 8.
He also linked directly to Comcon where you can see that the incumbent, Sobyanin, has fallen to 76% and Navalny has gone up to 14% (of the number of respondents who would vote for them).
No doubt someone (Kevin Rothrock?) will be along any minute to explain that Synovate Comcon is owned by some anti-Putin oligarch or something although it appears to be part foreign-owned. Berezovsky isn't available to kick around anymore — who is now, Prokhorov?
And to be sure, Synovate Comcon is a marketing research firm, and therefore may find what it finds for its paying clients; it's different than Levada, the respected independent firm which has recently posted only 4 or 5% approval ratings for Navalny.
But…how were the questions phrased in these polls? And it isn't it important to get the very latest information especially during and after the trial, when surely Navalny could be expected to get a bounce? Most importantly, can't we have more than one poll! Even Nate Silver would concede that.
Yet the Western press isn't reporting this improvement in rating — because some of them have made up their minds already about Navalny — or because they just don't fine-tune their Russia-watching.
Julia Ioffe had a much-retweeted piece on Navalny's sentence which people assumed was critical of Putin — although as usual with her pieces, it wasn't, really; it was just stating the usual received wisdom about Russia which nobody could deny.
Ioffe's article makes the obvious point that Putin is only allowing Navalny to get into the mayoral elections because he knows full well that a person with a prison sentence can't run for office, yet while he is free now on a pledge not to leave town and is appealing his sentence, he can go on campaigning. Perhaps Sobyanin is happy to have him break up the opposition vote so nothing detracts from his assured win even on the first round; in any event, he helped Navalany to beat the municipal filter and could only gain street cred for his authentic democracy by doing so.
But then Ioffe goes out of her way to tell us three times that Navalny is doing terrible in the polls; "he will surely lose—in the polls, he is still has yet to break into the double digits, and Sobyanin enjoys all the perks of a relatively popular incumbent," she says, then later reiterates twice that his polls stink.
The notion of Navalny's terrible polls is one that La Russophobe has hammered on endlessly:
The polls reveal that at most less than a third of Russians know who Navalny is. The one bit of good news is that among those in that tiny group the overwhelming majority, 67%, believe the charges against him in Kirov are politically motivated. But that means that less than 15% of the Russian population agrees with Navalny’s closing statement in court that he is being persecuted. The rest have no idea what he’s talking about.
Similarly, the polls show that a mere 5% of likely voters intend to cast their ballots for Navalny, roughly the same number as plan to vote for the Communist Party candidate Ivan Melnikov. A strong majority of 53%, by contrast, plans to support the incumbent mayor Sergei Sobyanin. Only 32% of respondents said they knew who candidate Navalny was, compared to 89% for Sobyanin.
Miriam Elder of The Guardian covers Navalny much more objectively than La Russophobe — starting with the fact that she is in Russia . (Phobe loathes the opposition leader because he's a living reminder that Russia isn't dying). And Ioffe always seems to maintain a superior little smile about the nationalist anti-corruption crusader despite her profiles, tweeting non-essentials (although the beat-down that Elder and she finally gave to Kevin Rothrock last night over his incessant trolling of Navalny while the man was on trial was something to see).
While Elder also cites the outdated Levada poll of 4%, she at least puts it into better context:
Navalny has won growing support among Russia's urban, internet-connected youth. Yet a recent poll by the Levada Centre, an independent pollster, said his support in the mayoral election stood at only 4%.
"Everything has fallen into place," wrote Sergei Parkhomenko, a popular journalist and opposition activist. "There are indeed two groups: one, quite powerful, but still subordinate, has its clear reasoning that Navalny should take part in elections," he wrote. "They will be ready to risk watching with horror day by day as Navalny's rating grows."
The second, Parkhomenko wrote, was more powerful and sought to rule by fear. "They dream of confusing us and ruining us," Parkhomenko wrote. "The most important thing is not to lose strength."
But none of these three Russia-watchers mentioned the Synovate Comcon poll that had so buoyed Navalny right before he was sentenced, and which lenta.ru covered.
Nor did they give the latest Levada figure, which as Lenta.ru tells us, is 8%, not 4% — see how Levada shows the jump from 3% to 8% in July:
According to Levada Center, which conducted a poll from 4-8 July, 78% of Moscow residents who have made up their mind about the election planned to vote for Sergei Sobyanin; for Alexey Navalny — 8%; for Ivan Melnikov, the candidate from the Communist Party of Russian Federation — 6%; and for Sergei Mitrokhin of Yabloko — 3%.
While 14% is hardly a barn-burner, it's now in the double digits that Ioffe claimed Navalny hadn't cleared; even according to Levada it's at least doubled to 8%. It's also a number that is increasing as Sobyanin's decreases, at least according to Comcon. To be sure, everything looks set to give Sobyanin his win, and even Navalny ironizes on the pitfalls in tracking "growth" — by noting that he'd be at "146%" by September at this rate.
Still, it's not nothing, and it's troubling that due to received wisdom about Levada (and an outdated Levada poll at that), and a groupthink about Navalny, this news may be overlooked.
In the US, if it is perceived that Navalny is scraping the floor without even a double digit, that perception gets locked in; in Russia, where at least those young hipsters might read Twitter and Comcon polls reposted on Facebook and know he's up above 14% now, it still doesn't mean that he has a chance in hell.
Some of the Western media (like Reuters) has mistaken as a spasm of liberalism on Putin's part, possibly induced by demonstrations, what is in fact a normal procedure: release while an appeal is in progress before starting a sentence. (This is a still-surviving Medvedev "innovation" to reduce the deterrence on entrepreneurial activity by reducing the harshness of penalties for economic crimes).
They don't seem to get that this respite only enables Navalny to reassure his troops a bit more on his blog, shop for warm socks, take super-vitamins, and pack for jail. There's his other court cases — those could produce eight years of imprisonment if they go anything like the Kirov case. He could be in prison as long as — or longer — than Khodorkovsky, which stands to reason, as Khodorkovsky had customers and grantees, but not really a social movement; Navalany has crowd-sourced funds and printed large runs of newspapers and has a genuine grass roots following, make of it what you will.
I don't think a lot of people will make good on Navalny's admonition that "If you are reading this, you are the resistance." People will either be too preoccupied with other things or afraid of losing what they have.
Still, I think we need to keep our eyes open here and not foreclose the results — which are not only measured in actual election to the highly-controlled office of mayor, but are measured in how much the candidate "got the word out" and gained followers in a social movement.
And the polls might go up further. I don't think these kind of web site straw polls represent anything beyond Facebookers in Moscow; but Yury Puzanov @yuriy_puzanov, a follower of Navalny tweeted on July 18, was among many on Twitter who cited the voting on Russian News Services (RSN), where Navalny was put at 60.3% in the second round and Sobyanin at only 39.7% This was retweeted a great deal, but it's hard to assess its validity — especially as again, a convict cannot run for office, and Putin can ensure that Navalny gets finally sentenced before September 8.
Having maybe 10 percent more in the polls than people think you have, or even 50% more isn't about actually winning elections; it's about having influence on the public. It's hard to imagine that Putin will allow that to go on. Maybe he won't have to work hard at it if the Western media helps keep a lid on it.
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