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September 28, 2006 06:24 PM UTC

Zogby Says Governor's Race Much Closer

  • 49 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

Recent polls showed Democrat Bill Ritter with a 17- and 16-point lead, respectively, over Republican Bob Beauprez, but the latest Wall Street Journal/Zogby poll shows that the race is much closer than that:

Bill Ritter: 45.5%
Bob Beauprez: 42.8%
margin of error +/- 4%

Frankly, we’re not sure what to make of this. Given that the last two polls, one by the Rocky Mountain News and one by Rasmussen Reports, showed the race to be much different, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Comments

49 thoughts on “Zogby Says Governor’s Race Much Closer

  1. They called no more than 40 households.  Wait for the full cross-tabs to come out, and we’ll see they over-polled republicans and under-polled unaffiliated voters. 

  2. With all past polling heavily favoring Ritter, and now this.  I’m a Ritter supporter, clearly, but I am curious to know if this is another Allard phenomena?

    Can Both Ways Bob, the Trailhead Group (aka Coloradans for Justice, Progress Colorado, et al) and the Colorado GOP fool the voters of Colorado?

    I say no, but I am just one voter.

    1. ….for a couple of reasons. 
        First, they’ve got John Marshall and Alan Phipps calling the shots this time, instead of Dick Wadhams.  Both Ways would be at least competitive (if not ahead) in all of the major current polls if Wadhams were here instead of wasting his time trying to salvage the Macaca’s political future in Virginia. 
        Second reason:  Allard may be dim, dull and slow but he has some sense of integrity.  I don’t think you’d see Allard doing the Both Ways’ shuffle on Ref. C & D, etc. 
        Allard is usually wrong, but he’s consistent about it and (I suspect) truly believes in what he’s doing.

  3. I think Ritter should start to get his hard hitting ads ready.  They need to tell the real story of BWB:  PE major, dodges the draft with fake ailment, sells the family farm to developers (makes millions), takes money from Russian mobster while in congress.  The guy has many weaknesses.

    1. It is time Bill’s campaign started telling voters about Beauprez accepting over $30,000 from Tom DeLay’s ARMPAC group and about his poor voting record in Congress on veteran’s issues. 

      1. I hope it dosen’t come to that.  I think there is a general revulsion amongst the electorate right now about these types of ads.  If Ritter just stays positive I think it might just make BB look more like an A-hole.

        1. If your opponent is successful with negative advertising – you have to compete in that arena also.  The only way to appeal to swing voters is through their emotion – you can throw logic out the door.

          1. I have seen campaigns in the past where the candidates “refused to go negative” for as long as they could but each one eventually gave in and started flinging dirt.

            Maybe it’s just a wish more than anything, that just one major candidate wouldn’t take the bait and would just go the high road.  They would probably lose the election, but it would be a good experiment.

            In the end the average voter dosen’t get any real information on where each candidate stands, just who the other candidate is screwing, who they sued or who sued them, how dirty and scandalous they are, etc. etc.

            Oh, and having an interest group run the ad and claiming “oh, it wasn’t us” is just lame.

            1. You have Tim Knaus to back Ritter up.  And he always does a great, professional job.  Very competent.  Can’t think of a single thing he has screwed up…

              You’re in good hands.

    2. CrazyOkie:  Bill, you need to put a spot up attacking Beauprez for having a physical education degree.
      Ritter:  Great idea.  We get the candidate discount, so that should only cost $200k or so.
      CrazyOkie:  Hooray!  We’re gonna show that guy once and for all….

      And how did he dodge the draft?  Because he didn’t get drafted?  Was he supposed to beg for the board to reconsider their decision?  By saying that he dodged the draft, you are saying that he was drafted, but did not show up to report.  Basically, you made that up.

      Sold his family farm?  Let’s put that one up with the “PE major” idea.  I guess I’m not fit for office.  I sold a house once and made a profit.

      Finally, I hope after the Ritter campaign makes the really painful/hard decisions not to take any of your first 3 ideas, they settle on the 4th -about the Russian mobster.

      I am really hoping you work for his campaign in some capacity.

      1. Actually, fascinatingly and accidentally enough, Moonraker is right.  Ritter shouldn’t pursue the negative attacks.

        He won’t need to, and not hitting the low road – as BWB has been all the while – will be a credit to him with voters in elections to come.  I reviewed the Zogby stuff, and that poll isn’t worth much.  I believe even a skpetic would place Ritter at least 10 points up right now, and I’m sure Bob’s campaign and the GOP are also tallying that score. 

        Beauprez’s campaign has been an impotent fiasco to date, so it’s possible that they could actually get it together and muster a decent effor these last few weeks, at least by comparison – but for a real shot this should have happened two months ago.  Either way, Ritter doesn’t need to sling any mud yet, Bob’s already dirty from spending so much time out in that quaint little barn (Didn’t he sell the farm?  What’s the deal?).

        1. Ritter is the only candidate in the Gov’s race to go up with negative ads on his opponent.  And to do that he had to clip & paste bunch of other people’s stuff (including Beauprez’s) to do it.  Yeah, Ritter’s all class.

          1. Both Ways Bob seems content to let Trailhead do the smearing.

            It’s easy to do when you decide to go negative on Ritter’s “cold cases” and then back out just before Trailhead goes negative on Ritter’s “cold cases”; no indication of coordination there…  And it’s not like BWB’s friends in the Republican Governor’s Association aren’t helping by donating their heard-won money not to Bob but rather to Trailhead as well; no collusion between party organizations and 527s there, no sir.

          2. If a 527 like CFJ is going negative, then so is the candidate they’re representing, regardless of whether they’re colluding. That will be the perception among voters, and perception is reality. 527s may be a new thing but I doubt the voters are going to watch the CFJ ad and not think that they speak for BWB.

      2. Moony,

        The guys is a walking, talking Wal-Mart ad.  Posing as everything he isn’t.  He would like you to believe that he is a macho, take-charge, smart, salt-of-the-earth guy.  The reality is, he avoided the draft with a stress-related ulcer.  He doesn’t even own a farm – he sold-out to a group of developers.  He was Bush’s poodle, rubber-stamping all of Bush’s agenda.  He didn’t do his research before accepting a extravegant trip to Isreal from a Russian mobster.  And, now, during the campaign he has earned his BWB label with rapidly changing positions. 

        Yeah, he’s got no weaknesses.

    3. Agreed……the gloves need to come off.  But I wouldn’t expect the negative ads to come from Ritter’s campaign.  They should come from Clear Peak………

      1. I didn’t realize Ritter had specifically produced some negative ads, anyobdy got a link?

        Regardless, I still say he doesn’t need it at this point.  Let the GOP get dirty in a race that the Dems have about sewn up.  I don’t have as big of a gripe with negative campaigning as most people seem to, but it’s a great PR tool to be able to say that you stayed out of it.

      1. “WHO” is talking about an initiative.  You don’t need to know what initiative, and you don’t need to know who paid for the poll.  But I’ll put more stock in that thing then a 36 person poll from Zogby that hat only 9% unaffiliated voters. 

        1. Back to consulting my stats book.  A poll of 36 people, for a proportion of approximately 0.5, yields an expected 95% confidence interval of +/- 16%, which is about four times the cited margin of error.  If they had just used those 36 responses and gotten these numbers result, then I suppose we could say that the true result is probably within the margin of error (the real one, not the one they gave) for the poll, but just barely.

          Margins of error are margins of error.  If they had done the poll that way and cited the correct margin of error, there wouldn’t be a whole lot of point in criticizing.  The real problem is that they seem to have included internet respondents as well in their results.  That’s a pretty good way to shoot yourself in the foot.  It’s more of a contest for who can tell their blog readers about the poll than who is actually winning.  With a biased sample, all bets are off for mathematical analysis.  It would be interesting to see the results for just the 36 households they called.  I’d be willing to bet it was a lot closer than the final results including the internet portion.

          1. You have to wonder why they would employ this kind of methedology for their poll when even the casual observer can poke holes in the results.  I wouldn’t say any kind of ominous partisan reason . . . maybe time or editorial crunches? Anyhow it’s a crappy way to run a business that is largely staked on your reputatation and accuracy.

      1. is 1500 to 2000.  anything over that does not give you increased reliability/accuracy of findings.

        A 400-500 sample size will give you reasonable findings with in the approx. 4% margin of error.

        Other things, of course can impact the reliabilty of the poll.

        How/what questions are asked?
        The demographic spread?
        Whether respondants are vetted based on their likelihood to vote,
        etc.

        Good pollsters give more reliable findings, others, well…..

      2. A true poll for statewide Colorado should be at least 500 respondents.  Anything less isn’t real.  I can’t believe that Zog would put their name behind a 40 person poll.  Something doesn’t sound right.

          1. Read the SurveyUSA thread, but the poll sample is ~615 people over the Internet, with a 40 person called sample to correct the 600+ for demographics.  It’s some weird thing Zogby is trying to perfect, and it’s obviously got a long way to go yet.

            When Zogby does real polls, he tends to be dead on the mark.  But these WSJ/Zogby polls are all from Zogby Interactive, and they generally suck on reliability.

            1.   Is this like that magazine (I forgot its name) which went extinct in 1937 after it did telephone polling in 1936 projecting that Alf Landon was going to clean FDR’s clock that Nov?  Of course, Alf Landon caried Vermont and Maine while FDR carried the other 46 states in a landslide. 
                The problem was that the magazine tried something new:  polling households with telephones.  That was cutting-edge technology in 1936, but very representative of the general voting public since very people owned telephones, and those that did were more likely to be wealthy and vote Republican.

  4. I’d want to see the methedology behind the Zogby poll and sample numbers . . . I’m pretty positive that Ritter is up at least over ten points . . . Zogby shows them virtually neck and neck within the margin of error, and at this point I don’t think anybody is buying that. 

  5. I don’t trust this Zogby result any more than I trust their other poll showing Lamont within 2 points of Lieberman.  Zogby Interactive polls have been wild outliers on a semi-regular basis since Zogby started doing them; they use a different polling method that I think Zogby is still trying to refine…

  6. According to a 9News/SUSA poll that just came out, Ritter leads by 17 points (55-38.  That WSJ/Zogby poll is obviously a joke, and the voters of Colorado are still rejecting the backwards thinking (or lack thereof) of Both Ways Bob, a.k.a. the “Elk Whisperer.”  Here’s a link to that poll: http://www.9news.com

  7. Look at the cross-tabs.

    Beauprez is pulling only 78% of the Republicans polled.

    Ritter pulls 89% of the Democrats…

    BUT MOST IMPORTANTY,

    Bob just gets 25% of the Independents (or “Unaffiliated”, for us professionals) to 58% of them breaking for Bill.

    Now, here’s where it gets fun…

    Of the total sampling of likely voters: 38% were Republican, 37% Democrat and 24% Independent.

    (giggle giggle)

    Extrapolate that third voting block up, to where it really should be, and then you get to add at least two points to the Ritter number

    NOW THAT’S A POLL.

    Ritter is up by almost 20.

    Yes, that will change.  Yes, Republicans will try to GOTV hard, but if the Dems can drive in the U voters, this could forever scar Beauprez and his “campaign team” as being the most lopsided Democrat victory in recent times. 

    1.   I’m surprised Both Ways is getting 78% of the GOP vote.  I figured the Little Fella’s friends numbered more than that and they’re still pissed. 
        BTW, has Mike Norton collected his $78,000 in court costs from Marc Holtzman yet?

      1. Is that Marc is calling people asking them to support Bob and contribute to his campaign.

        But not only is Norton still out 78K, so is Gessler – who still seems to be suing Holtzy for nothing more then the satisfaction of it. 

        1. Judge: “Tell me again what suit you are filing?”
          Gessler: “Your honor, we are filing suit against Holtzman for the pure satisfaction of it (PSOI pronounced soy)”
          Judge: “Motion for a directed verdict in Gessler’s favor is granted. Next case”
          Gessler: “Your honor, we again would like to file a soy claim against Holtzman.”

          That came out funnier in my head than when I read it now. Law School is killing my humor.

  8. I don’t think I buy either Zogby or Survey USA.  It’s probably a single digit Ritter lead, I just don’t know by how much.  Bob’s internals are a lot better than the polls are showing.

    If you look at the SUSA poll it shows the marriage amendment 25-25.  What???  It looks to me like they polled a bunch of people who really have paid zippo attention to what’s been going on.  I’ve never seen a poll where only half of the respondents have any idea how they’re going to vote.  The amendment will pass by at least 20 points, so I’m afraid SUSA did little service to voters on this one. 

    1. Even if such internals exist, and they’re being kept private for whatever reason, don’t refer to them. Private polls are nonexistent polls for the purposes of fair debate.

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