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Thursday, January 19, 2006

On Internal Polls

As a general rule, there are certain kinds of polls I don't like to report. One are Zogby's Internet polls - I don't trust the methodology or accuracy. I'm also always somewhat suspicious of partisan polls, for obvious reasons. And, likewise, I'm definitely very skeptical of internal campaign polls. I'm not saying that independent polls are always right, or better, or anything so extreme - but I do think, on average, they deserve greater trust. (And if you want to compare pollsters, SurveyUSA has put together some great interactive spreadsheets covering just about every outfit in the land.)

Anyhow, I say all this because you may have heard about an internal poll from John Morrison, showing him up 39-20 over Jon Tester in the Montana Democratic senate primary. As I say, I'm no fan of internal polls - I didn't give any airtime to Sherrod Brown's recent survey, either. But I also don't want to be accused of ignoring "bad news" about Jon Tester, a guy I support. I'm not going to spend time trying to dissect this poll - and in any event, we've got almost no information about it except for the topline number. It's clearly not good news for Tester, but I'll wait until we have an independent poll on this primary before I sink my teeth into anything.

Posted at 04:55 PM in Polls | Technorati

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Comments

hi David,

ive discussed on here before that us senate candidate patty wetterling should drop out and instead run for the 6cd which she lost to mark kennedy a few years ago. well, shes supposed to make an "announcement" tomorrow regarding her future. shes believed to be dropping out and throwing her support to amy klobuchar. its unclear whether she will run for the 6cd again-appearantly shes going to decide a little bit later on what her future is. she may well run as ag mike hatch's running mate. appearantly he offered it but she turned him down. no one really knows. id like to see us here do something on this website to convince her to run most likely against the utterly evil michele bachmann for the 6cd.

what can we do? im personally gonna donate some $$$ to her and thank her. i never thought she would do what shes gonna do tomorrow. she is truly a loyal DFLer and i believe in rewarding loyalty in a party that often lacks it.

Posted by: jcb at January 19, 2006 08:26 PM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment