The Holmes & Watson Report
Election 2000 Fact-Finding Poll

By Brad Keefauver

An important part of any modern political campaign is sensing the will of the voters long before the election is held, and when C.H.E.A.P. (The Committee for Holmes Elected As President) came to the staff of The Holmes & Watson Report for assistance, we were only too happy to help.

Our readership contains a fair cross-section of Sherlockian America. To help the Sherlock Holmes for President campaign target its message to specific focus groups, we broke the readership down into the following types:

25.64% The King of Bohemia type
17.94% The Helen Stoner type
0.00% The Victor Hatherley type
7.69% The Violet Hunter type
46.15% The Dr. James Mortimer type
2.58% Miscellaneous others (including the person who claimed to be better than all the other types)

The Mortimer type, the casually-dressed and good-natured bookworm, seems to make up the bulk of those surveyed, which is not too surprising. More interesting is the fact that roughly a quarter of our study group is made up of giants in gaudy clothes, the King of Bohemia type. This may, however, reflect self-image more than physical reality, as flashy-dressing behemoths are not commonly seen at Sherlockian gatherings.

A result that was met with much joy by the Committee for Holmes Elected As President was the current standing of Sherlock Holmes against a random selection of other candidates:

76.92% Sherlock Holmes
0.00% Al Gore
7.69% George W. Bush
10.25% Colin Powell
2.56% Mick “Mankind” Foley
2.58% Others (including those who dispute Holmes’s eligibility)

As you can see, if the presidential election was held tomorrow at a Sherlockian conference, Sherlock Holmes would have little problem gaining office. The popularity of Colin Powell among Sherlockian voters has been attributed to the “Watson effect” — the fact that both he and the good doctor are trusted ex-military men.

With Holmes polling so strongly among Sherlockian voters, it was a prime chance to see just what his strong points are. And that is just what we looked at:

41.02% “The most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen.”
12.82% “The strong, masterful personality . . . all were equally puppets in his hands.”
7.69% “His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed.”
7.69% “Never worked less than fifteen hours a day and had more than once kept to his task for five days at a stretch.”
25.64% “Holmes's ideas of humour are strange and occasionally offensive.”

Having looked at what makes Holmes so popular among voters, we also wanted to see just how popular he really is. On a scale of one to ten, we asked those polled to rank Sherlock Holmes as the best and the wisest man they have ever known, ten being the highest and one the lowest. Again, it was no surprise that Sherlock rated a full “10” with 56.41% of Sherlockians, not less than a “6” with anyone, and an average rating of 9.21. This is exceptionally good for a ten-point ranking, as many rankers traditionally leave the number ten open for an impossible-to-achieve ideal (or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as one of our respondents did).

The question of nationality has been coming up again and again in the Holmes for President campaign, and the Committee for Holmes Elected As President wanted to see just how this might affect public perception of Holmes. To test this, we asked the question, “If the United States of America was still the English Colonies of America, and we had to fight the Revolutionary War today to keep those Brits from taxing our tea, whose side do you think Sherlock Holmes would be on?” The results were as follows:

25.64% Great Britain
12.82% America
0.00% France
5.12% The Hessian mercenaries
51.28% The art of detection
5.14% Other (including the wag who wrote in “Lipton”)

Even though there seems to be some perception of non-American loyalty by respondents, Sherlock Holmes still seems to be seen as being above national divisions, a man who follows a cause rather than a clannish grouping. Depending upon media spin, this could be seen as either a positive or negative factor in his campaign.

With taxes being one of the ever-present issues in any campaign, we sampled Sherlockian views on Holmes’s statement, “If it’s on the market I’ll buy it — if it means another penny on the income-tax.” Only about eight percent of our survey group was concerned that it signaled Holmes as a taxing president. A quarter of those polled used it as an excuse to bash their least favorite political party, and the remainder either admitted no worries or were willing to laugh about it.

The biggest cause of dispute in the Sherlock Holmes for President campaign, however, caught us all by surprise. Given a healthy selection of possible names for the new political party to push Holmes into the presidency, a full two-thirds of those polled suggested their own name for the party, rather than voting for such choices as “The Very Snug Little Party” (slim favorite with one-eighth of the tally), “The Late Theatre Party,” “Party! Party! Party!”and “The Not Much for a Third Party” (all getting a mere two votes each). Party names written in by those polled included:

The Stag Party, the Logical Party, the Detection Party, the Deductors Party, the Elementary Deductive Party, the Party of Four (or the Four), the Party of the First Part, the Back to 1895 Party, the East Wind Blowing Party, the Bullpup Party, the Woman’s Party (NOT), the Know Everything Party, the Musical Scientists Party, the Illustrious Builder Party, the Rising Business Party, the Quite a Family Party (Mycroft for V.P. and Watson as Surgeon General), the Winds of Change Party, the Baker Street Irregulars Party, the Ratiocination Party, the Unionist League, the Crooked Man Party, the Reason-able Party, the Amateur Mendicant Society, the Pennyworth of a Difference Party, and the Quiet Caninians.

With such a wide range of viewpoints on the issue of party name, it may be some time before the Committee for Holmes Elected As President is able to come up with a final decision. In the meantime, we hope that Holmes’s strong grassroots following in the Sherlockian world, as revealed by this poll, will be enough to carry him to victory in the November election. (Did anyone say this was an unbiased survey?)