Tag: Mike the Mover

SurveyUSA for KING-TV (8/6-9, likely and actual voters, 6/25-28 in parentheses):

Patty Murray (D-inc): 41 (37)

Dino Rossi (R): 33 (33)

Clint Didier (R): 11 (5)

Others: 10 (6)

Undecided: 4 (19)

(MoE: ±3.9%)

While Dino Rossi has been, in public, trying to stay above the fray and treat his advancing from Washington’s Top 2 primary as a given, he’s also been trying to consolidate support from various right-wing kingmakers (Jim DeMint, Tom Coburn), which suggests he’s at least somewhat sweating the challenge from various teabaggers on his right flank. SurveyUSA’s new poll (of likely and “actual” voters, the latter being those who’ve already sent in their mail-in ballots) shows that there his efforts may be warranted, as he’s flat while everyone else is gaining: principal Tea Party opposition Clint Didier, Democratic incumbent Patty Murray, and the vast hodgepodge that is “other” (partially fellow teabagger Paul Akers, who’s in the low single digits, but also 12 other assorted dreamers and cranks). Rossi, of course, is in no danger of losing his ticket to the big dance in November, but he probably wants to avoid an embarrassing finish in distant second.

As with the previous SurveyUSA poll, one red flag for Murray is that Rossi + Didier > Murray. PPP‘s recent poll of the primary is an interesting comparison point, because their numbers for the Republicans are pretty similar while finding Murray further along (Murray 47, Rossi 33, Didier 10, Akers 4)… but they don’t include an “Other,” suggesting that SurveyUSA is finding at least a handful of folks who prefer Murray to the GOPers but, given the full panoply of options, plan to waste their primary votes on one of the perennial candidates who are self-described Dems (like the ubiquitous Mike the Mover).

SurveyUSA for KING-TV (6/25-28, likely voters, no trendlines):

Patty Murray (D-inc): 37

Dino Rossi (R): 33

Clint Didier (R): 5

Others: 6

Undecided: 19

(MoE: ±4.4%)

SurveyUSA is doing a couple things right with their newest poll of Washington: first, they’re looking at Washington’s “top two” primary, which is the first hurdle that Patty Murray and Dino Rossi have to clear. (Their only previous poll of this race was of the November general election; the only public poll of the race to have shown a Rossi lead, it was declared, pretty much by universal consensus, to be an outlier.)

In not much of a surprise, considering that Murray is the only legitimate Democrat while Rossi has to fight off a teabagger challenge from Clint Didier, Murray has a single-digit lead. Note that Rossi + Didier is about equal to Murray (although maybe not every Didier voter will shift to Rossi in November, as the state’s movement conservatives seem a lot more lukewarm about Rossi than they did two years ago, when he was the vehicle for their “we wuz robbed” indignation)… presaging a close general election race, though. (They also painstakingly list all 15 candidates, including perpetual perennial candidates like Mike the Mover and the mighty GoodSpaceGuy… who, despite his fondness for things technological, doesn’t seem to have his own website.)

The other thing that SurveyUSA is doing is adding cellphones to the mix here, despite the added expense of having to use a call center with live callers to reach cellphone users (owing to laws prohibiting auto-dialing cellphones). This is an issue I’ve groused about a lot, and it’s one where the distortion, I’ve always believed, is particularly pronounced in Washington (where the 18-34 year old set is particularly liberal, and also where they tend to be the tech-savvy early-adopters who would be the first to cast off the shackles of their landlines), so I want to offer SurveyUSA props for doing so.

Interestingly, though, the addition of cellphone users doesn’t seem to make much of a difference in the overall numbers. SurveyUSA offers a variety of different models with varying cellphone composition, and Murray always has a 4 or 5 point lead. With no cellphones in the mix, Murray’s up 39-34, and with cellphones comprising 30% of the mix, she leads 37-32. And most puzzlingly, 18-34 year olds are still the only age group in the crosstabs who favor Rossi (albeit narrowly, 33-28, while even those cynical members of Generation X opt for Murray, 40-26). So maybe, in the same way that they can’t be bothered to fill out their Census forms, Seattle’s urban hipsters still can’t be bothered to respond to phone calls from pollsters either.