| A group called "New Leadership Colorado" sent out a press release late this evening showing Democrat Andrew Romanoff within striking distance of Sen. Michael Bennet in the race for the Democratic nomination for Senate. "New Leadership Colorado" claims that it has no ties to either Romanoff or Bennet, but obviously their interests are with Romanoff (because there would be no other reason to announce this otherwise).
The automated phone survey shows Bennet leading Romanoff 44-40, with what they say is a margin of error of +/-3.6%. Given that every other head-to-head poll released to this point has shown Bennet with a double-digit lead, this is good news for Romanoff, right?
Maybe.
The polling and memo was done by a Democratic communications firm called Zata3, a name that should be familiar to many politicos for their robocalls, direct mail and other communications tools such as text messaging.
But what Zata3 does not normally do is polling. That doesn't mean that they definitely don't have these numbers correct, but they are not a polling firm. You hire Zata3 to do persuasion phone calls or text messaging -- not polling -- just like you wouldn't normally hire a polling firm to do your direct mail (or for a real-world example, you wouldn't go to a dry cleaner to buy a sandwich). This is no knock on Zata3, it's just that it seems odd that you wouldn't use a professional polling firm if you wanted real polling results.
We wondered when we first got the press release at 6:17 PM why anyone would release something this potentially helpful so late in the day; normally you would never send something to the press this late because it would almost certainly get buried and not make it on the news. But perhaps that was the point -- to put it out late enough that news outlets wouldn't have time to really check into the data and the "pollster."
Full press release after the jump. |
