The New Weiss Poll

It looks like Patty Wiess has released one of her polls. It also appears that many of the other blog sites have had quite a stir over the results. It should be fun to analyze this poll without necessarily having a favorite on that side of the race. Here are the points I'd bring up.

1. The sample size looks low to me, and this seems to show with some of the results. I cannot believe that Jeff Latas is actually only pulling down 7% of the vote in the poll (So I won't). This would be a big signal to me that the poll may have internal inconsistencies. As I mentioned before, polls are certainly fallible, and this should be a big red flag. The only way I can see this happening is if independents were oversampled or the poll were not conducted over the entire district (I'd lean toward the poll having limited geographic reach). Certainly a gander of the demographics of respondents would help clear this up.

2. I'm also very suspicious of a poll where much of the information and methodology is redacted. It smells of trying to hide something. Patty paid for the poll, so she can release what she wants to, but it certainly seems fishy. Hopefully she will release more at a later date.

3. There are a few positives in this poll for Patty. Her strong support (the people who are actually going to show up to vote) stands at 23%, which if this poll is accurate (a huge IF) it means that adding a good 17% should be enough to nail down the nomination. She has 9% of that needed percentage leaning her way which would leave her needing to gather about one third of the complete undecideds, which is certainly doable. Gabby would need to gather more than half of the current undecideds and keep her leaners. This may be even more difficult as I believe that an underpolled Latas cuts more into available Gabby voters than Patty voters.

Obviously her name recognition is still pretty high, but the favorability is a wash as a 4% unfavorability is actually quite a good thing for Giffords.

4. There are a few good things for Giffords in this poll as well. I already mentioned the almost total lack of antipathy for Giffords (all of the Republicans are much more polarizing within their own party with the possible exception of Frank Antenori.) Also, her commiteds form a greater percentage of her entire support, which may show that Weiss's support is pretty shallow and built on name recognition alone (at least more so than Gabby.) Finally, I would still think that name recognition alone should be worth more than a 10% lead at this point. Weiss will need to start campaigning in Earnest to stave Giffords off.

5. The biggest and perhaps ONLY thing that can be concluded from this poll is that Patty has dropped her "Only Patty can beat the Republicans" line for any recent polling. I cannot believe that she has not polled for this since January (I would confidently bet that she has). Either her results (that she is hiding) are showing that Gabby can also beat the Republican (unlikely if only 40% of Democrats know who Giffords is), or that Patty has fallen behind the possible Republican candidate (a lot has changed since the poll was taken in January, with the Republicans on a slight upsurge.) The dog that is not barking is perhaps the most interesting and useful thing to be gathered from this memorandum.

But as I mentioned, I don't truly trust polls.