| I operated under the premise that the pollster's turnout model is wildly optimistic. 30% turnout in a special election? I think low 20's is more apt based on past types of races.
Does low turnout benefit him or the other candidates? IMO it helps the others (DeSauliner and Buchanan specifically) as this base of the base is highly informed and may not be as receptive to this Arlen Specter-esque move by Garamendi. Now under these assumptions then Buchanan dropping out helps DeSauliner tremendously and vice versa.
Additionally I'd think that with 80% name recognition and getting only 24% support I'd be a bit concerned. There is a measurement called vote expansion and DeSaulnier, et al have a lot more room to grow as the CA-10 electorate doesn't know them.
Lastly releasing these numbers at this point in the race strikes me as a stupid move. They are showing their hand way too early and it begs the question why? It seems that the CM/GC may have had a moment of panic and had the pollster draft up this polling memo getting the underwear to show so to say..
Below are the comments from my a colleague that wanted to stay out of this:
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There are more active voters in CA-11 than in CA-10. I've been using last June's primary as a sort of benchmark, since it was bifurcated from the presidential and there were no statewide offices. The uncontested Congressional nominees were at the top of the ticket, with largely uncontested state senate and state assembly races below, along with a couple of propositions. A real dud.
So we have 376K registered voters in CA-11: 173K Dems (47%), 106K Reps (29%), and 81K DTS (18%)
Total turnout was 85K... 55K Dem votes and 30K Rep votes.
So total turnout was 22%. Broken down as a percentage of party registration, Dem turnout was 31% and Rep turnout was 28%. But that doesn't include DTS.
And 65% of the vote went to the single Dem candidate, 35% went to the single Republican candidate.
I'm assuming they're looking at voter file data to come up with that number of 55% Democratic, 33% Republican 12% DTS. Frankly it makes no sense that you would have such strong turn-out among DTS voters in this race so I'm not sure exactly what they're doing.
But I think that Rupf's place in the race is severely overstated, but since he was identified as the sole Rep in the race he drew potential votes based just on that.
There's was so little information made public about this poll, that I suspect they pulled a few numbers that made them look strong and buried the rest. Did they give a bio of the candidates and then ask which way they would vote? Did that change the results? Because with 80% name recognition, I find the 24% vote kind of low -- it would seem to me that doesn't bode extremely well for JG. Also note that the MoE is 5% which at least theoretically, could put JG, MD and JB all neck and neck.
All told, I'm not giving a lot of credence to the poll, especially with no cross tabs available. |
