Polling

When people say, 'We're going to win on turnout,' it usually means, 'We're going to lose.'"-- Mark Mellman, one of the country's top Democratic pollsters, at a WisPolitics luncheon, saying Dems will be able to craft an election message that resonates with the small number of undecided.

Lots of data coming our way, with little time to analyze it.  But here it is:

Public Policy Polling says that if Wisconsin voters had a chance to hold the governor's election all over again, Tom Barrett would beat Scott Walker 52-45, mostly because of union members who voted for Walker in November but never would again.

Again, it suggests that if Walker had been honest about his union-busting plans during  the campaign he never would have been elected.

Meanwhile, former Badger Ken Strasma offers analysis of some micro-targeting that he says shows there is enough active support to force the recalls of up to eight Republican state senators. More likely a smaller number would be targeted, but Strasma says the potential to get enough signatures is there in every district.

After months of trashing the Rasmussen Reports polls, what a surprise to find that they look pretty credible compared with the latest one from the University of Wisconsin survey center.

Judging from those numbers, pretty much all of the campaigning anyone has done up until now has been a waste of time and money. Three and a half months before the general election, they say, no one knows who's running, and if they do know they don't care.

A dozen previous polls in the governor's race, summarized on Pollster.com, have had Democrat Tom Barrett somewhere between 34 and 46 per cent of the vote, with Republicans Scott Walker and Mark Neumann in a range between 34 and 49. (One from St. Norbert College had Barrett lower, but it's an outlier -- or it was until the UW effort came along.) 

The UW poll would have us believe that Barrett has 15 per cent of the vote, while 32 per cent say they'd vote for a Republican (no one asked them which one.)

In the Senate race, they say Russ Feingold leads Ron Johnson 25-19.

Rasmussen Reports feels obliged to defend its honor, after it is pointed out that not only are Rasmussen polls reliably slanted Republican, but RR's chief is hanging out on a National Review cruise.

The response from a Rasmussen flak is pretty generic:

"Republican and Democratic campaigns both sometimes attack the messenger when they try to distract attention from news they don't like," Rasmussen spokeswoman Debra Falk wrote in an e-mail. "In the case of the Wisconsin Senate race, virtually every poll has shown (U.S. Sen. Russ) Feingold below 50% against every potential Republican challenger. That's a sure sign of a potentially vulnerable candidate. However, incumbents are often able to overcome a weak environment and win re-election."

Of course, what people have questioned is not the fact that Feingold is under 50%, which is not unusual, but that Rasmussen says he's even with Ron Johnson, the unknown Republican. Ms. Falk (no relation to the Dane County exec) doesn't address that.

As for the cruise, she says her boss is just one popular guy who gets invited and paid

Beware of campaigns bearing polls.

Just when you thought there was nothing more unreliable than a Rasmussen poll, Scott Walker's campaign issues a memo saying Walker's 20 points ahead in the primary. Other private polls have it much closer, almost a dead heat.

Of course, the one-page memo tells nothing else about the poll results, the question that was asked, or even the cross-tabs on the head-to-head it touts.

Let's hope against hope that the news media does not start reporting this sort of unsubstantiated spin from the campaigns themselves.

What Wisconsin needs is a reliable, independent poll done by a media outlet or some other public interest group that has no axe to grind and doesn't favor any candidate. Many other states, from Iowa to California, have them, but Wisconsin is left at the mercy of anyone who can type a press release.

In 20 years of working on campaigns, I can't recall ever leaking or issuing a poll done for the campaign, despite media inquiries.

We already dissed the latest Rasmussen Senate poll yesterday, but this comes from a more authoritative source, Nate Silver at 538. He's the guy who almost perfectly predicted the last presidential race in every state. Silver says:

Rasmussen released a poll suggesting that Ron Johnson, a businessman from Oshkosh, is running just 2 points behind Democratic incumbent Russ Feingold in Wisconsin's Senate race.

Have you ever heard of Ron Johnson? I hadn't until about three days ago. And it seems unlikely that many voters in the Badger State would have heard about him either. Johnson didn't announce his candidacy until two weeks ago. He's never held political office before. He runs a small business called Pacur Inc that has only 73 employees. He doesn't have a campaign website up. He doesn't have a Wikipedia page.

 UPDATE: Equally unreliable Rasssmussen poll says Feingold and Thompson in a dead heat for US Senate. WPRI had Tommy up 12%.

Wisconsin's Pretend Research Institute (WPRI), the right-wing propaganda machine, is trying to defend itself against recent bad publicity suggesting its polls -- or the way it reports results -- are slanted to fit their world view: WPRI Poll Tracks Consistently with National Polls:

Today, NBC and the Wall Street Journal released a poll that details public opinion regarding the health care bill before Congress, the public’s views of the direction of the country, and other national issues. The NBC/WSJ poll tracks very closely with the WPRI poll we released late last week. To wit:

•In the WSJ/NBC poll, 48% of the public opposed the health care bill currently before Congress, while 36% labeled it “a good idea.” In the WPRI poll, 37% favored the plan and 55% opposed it.

•In the WSJ/NBC poll, President Obama’s approval rating was 48%. In WPRI’s poll, Obama’s approval is 49%.

•In the WSJ/NBC poll, 33% of Americans believed the country was headed in the right direction, while 59% believed the country was on the wrong track. In the WPRI poll, those numbers are 34% and 59%, respectively.

All of that proves exactly nothing, of course. Are we to believe that the opinions of Wisconsin people are exactly the same as those across the country?