Wednesday, July 12, 2006

More Rumors

Finally something to report in advance of the fundraising numbers. These are rumors probably on the Drudge level of "grain of salt." I would definitely place them higher than a Truthout.org story on the believability scale however.

1. Apparently one of the GOP candidates has a poll of district Republicans showing that 80% of those polled support building a fence on the border, and 90% support controlling the border before discussing what to do with the illegal immigrants already here.

2. Another internal poll a gave 30% of the likely GOP primary vote to Graf, 12% to Hellon, and 4% to Huffman. A lot of undecideds out there.

3. Look for the Huffman advertising blitz to begin on Tuesday.

3 comments:

Michael Bryan said...

If those internal poll numbers are good (I sure would like to get a crack at that poll's raw data) then Hellon is showing very strong. I have to say that I am surprised also that Huffman is only showing 4%; most likely that's within the MoE of ZERO. Any idea which campaign's internals this is?

Framer said...

I have a good guess, but if I leak it, it may kill my source.

Honestly, at this point, who knows who Huffman outside of the insanely politicaly active? He has not campaigned at all, and he wasn't really all that of a standout in his state career. It appears that what little involved grassroots that Kolbe retained has went over to Hellon. In my personal experience I have seen ONE Huffman bumper sticker as the only outward grassroots support for Huffman and I travel around quite a bit, especially on the Northwest side. I have also gotten correspondence from at least one supporter of every GOP candidate except his. A small thing, but it makes me wonder.

Of course, a $500,000 war chest seven weeks out may be more than enough to get known. There is a whopping 56% undecided, if the poll is accurate. There is certainly room to grab votes via a media blitz. Win or lose, Huffman's campaign is going to be a textbook example of how to win by delaying spending until the last possible moment, or how to lose by spending too much time fundraising rather than campaigning.

The biggest outward indicator of the validity of this poll will be if Steve comes out negative in his first ads. If he does, then it would show that he has a lot of ground to make up, and this data is representative of actual opinion. If he hits the issues, then he will have been looking at an entirely different set of polling data, that is more optimistic for him.

Anonymous said...

The poll does not surprise me at all. First, there is a huge undecided. Sounds correct.

Second Huffman is a putz. A lot of people in his own district, even in his own neighborhood do not like him. Steve is not a very good campaigner and has not faced real competition is several years.

One of the biggest things he did in the legislature was Rio Nuevo. Hello Steve, Downtown Tucson is not in your legislative district and is also not part of CD 8. Too bad all those Democrat artsy types living downtown can’t vote for you in the primary or general even if they wanted.