What is Senator Tom Coburn's brand?

SoonerPoll added a new question to the most recent Quarterly Poll, that is designed to gain an understanding of why likely Oklahoma voters feel the way they do about their elected officials.

We asked likely Oklahoma voters "What one word best describes your impression of Tom Coburn?"

Results reveal that 37 respondents answered 'Conservative,' making it the most popular response.  'Good' and 'Honest' were the second and third most popular responses with 33 and 32 respondents respectively.

To illustrate these results, all of the responses were entered into a program called Wordle, which creates a "word cloud" that gives frequent responses greater prominence.

"Word clouds are perhaps the single greatest way to visualize one's brand," said Bill Shapard, CEO of SoonerPoll.com and Shapard Research, a full service market research specializing in branding research. "For politicians, their brand is a shorthand for the voter's experience with them and a promise, of sorts, that past performance will indicate future results."

"In elections, the candidate's brand should be considered their greatest asset," said Keith Gaddie, a political science professor at the University of Oklahoma and vice president at SoonerPoll.com. "A campaign, at its core, is designed to favorably define its own candidate's brand and negatively define its opponent's brand."

SoonerPoll.com, Oklahoma's public opinion pollster commissioned and conducted the poll. The scientific study was conducted using live interviewers by telephone of 509 likely voters from May 2-12. The study has a margin of error of ±4.34 percent.

To view a high quality version of the word cloud and a list of all the responses, please click here to download the PDF document.