First polls are in with all eight of the official candidates. There are no surprises.
Results of VCIOM and FOM polls, both from Feb 11 (adjusting for don’t knows, won’t votes, etc.):
| VCIOM | FOM | |
| Putin | 82.3% | 84.2% |
| Zhirinovsky | 6.3% | 6.8% |
| Grudinin | 8.4% | 6.8% |
| Sobchak | 1.2% | 1.1% |
| Yavlinsky | 0.9% | 0.6% |
| Titov | 0.2% | 0.1% |
| Suraykin | 0.1% | 0.1% |
| Baburin | 0.6% | 0.3% |
Only marginal change from what I was expected is that it seems Baburin might take sixth place instead of Titov, but the numbers are so small it doesn’t really matter anyway.
What evidently is a problem, as I have been pointing out, is projected turnout. There’s a chance it might be even lower than 60%, lower even than in the anodyne 2004 election, when nobody of even marginal significance bothered running against Putin.
So they’re evidently getting to work on this.
I have asked a few people about this who have been here longer than I have, and there is a general consensus that there are greater efforts to get people out to vote than in any previous election under Putin.
Anon from TN
Why do they bother? Russia, like the US and most European countries, does not have a participation cutoff. E.g., only 26% of eligible voters voted for Trump in 2016, so what?
Propaganda reasons. The low turnout will be interpreted by Western propaganda as broad support for Navalny (who called for a boycott of the election). Despite the fact that the election will ignore (for the most part) just potential supporters of Putin.
Because if nobody cares to vote for them nobody will care if they’ll get overthrown later either – and they do have to start planning for eventual transition.
And, on local level, because turnout have been made into “popular support of local governance” metric (which feeds into first point); and whatever gets measured gets optimised for.
OT sort of:
Rock the Vote … was founded in 1990 by Virgin Records America Co-Chairman Jeff Ayeroff, to encourage young people to vote
1990 Rock the Vote commercial where Madonna and two of his gay friends threaten to perform sadomasochistic sex acts on the viewer if they fail to vote.
looks like we have a concerted media campaign going on, full of bombastic claims and repetition
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/16/russian-mercenaries-in-syria-buried-quietly-and-forgotten
yeah there is an attempt. To rock the vote
Is there something I don’t know about?
Back in the day, Madonna refused to date men who hadn’t tried the homo. Make of that what you want. 🙂
Sobchak (or Sobczak) is a low-status (i.e., not noble) Polish surname.
I understand she is part Jewish. Zhirinovsky spelled Żyrynowski could
also be Polish (although I’ve never heard of anyone named Żyrynowski in
Poland) and he is also part Jewish. I’m curious, what is the sense in Russia?
Are people with Polish-sounding names sometimes suspected of being Jewish?
Of course, I realize that many names are common in both Poland and Russia,
Czajkowski (Tchaikovsky) and Sikorski (Sikorsky) probably being the most
famous examples.
Ironically, the surname Polyakov (i.e. literally the son of a pole) is considered Jewish. But Wroblewski, Sikorsky, Sosnowski considered as Polish surname.
Sobchak is only Jewish through her mother (the father some people claimed were Jewish, but it was just political rumours, not truth at all).
Zhirinovsky is Jewish through the father, but was given his non-Jewish step-father’s surname after his non-Jewish mother remarried.