Link to article here.
For more than a year, all we the PEOPLE have heard is how UNTOUCHABLE Perry is, that there’s NO WAY anyone can beat him, and that we’re all just wasting our time. Gloat no more, tollers, because for the first time, Perry is within striking distance, and with the PEOPLES’ help in crossing the finish line, he’s on his way OUT OF OFFICE for good. Of course, Perry’s spin doctors are running from the truth and trying to paint a rosey picture, but we the grassroots know where he stands…and he’s about to get a ONE WAY ticket home from Austin!
The professor cited in the article says he doesn’t think Perry is that low because nothing happened to cause a drop….wanna bet? It’s called…the Trans Texas Corridor Hearings and Strayhorn attended more than a dozen of them, and she had people on their feet in standing ovations only two lines into her speech!
Zogby’s polling is clearly problematic, but Rasmussen, who was the most accurate pollster in the last presidential election shows Perry under 35% and Strayhorn in second…and that’s BEFORE her ad campaign began. The other candidates don’t have the money to come close to rival the top two candidates’ ad campaigns (Perry $10 million, Strayhorn $8 million, Bell & Kinky less than $1 million each), which is by far the most influential medium to reach voters.
This is a two person race, and once Texans see it comes down to Strayhorn or another 4 damaging years of Perry, she’ll galvanize the more than 60% of voters already against Perry and become our next Governor. More good news, THREE transportation commissioners’ terms will be up as of next March, including Chair Ric Williamson. So Strayhorn will be able to install a majority on the commission immediately and turn this train around!
Polls find Perry loss isn’t out of the question
But governor’s spokesman says methodology used in surveys makes them unreliable
By R.G. RATCLIFFE
Houston Chronicle
Sept. 12, 2006
AUSTIN — Two polls released Monday found Gov. Rick Perry is vulnerable to defeat, but his campaign is questioning the surveys’ accuracy.
Conventional wisdom in the governor’s race has been that none of the governor’s four opponents would have a chance to beat him if he gets more than 35 percent of the vote on Nov. 7. There is no runoff in the general election, so the top vote-getter wins.
Perry has hovered between 35 percent and 41 percent in public polls for months. But he has fallen into the defeatable zone in polls done by Rasmussen Reports and the Wall Street Journal/Zogby Online.
The Rasmussen poll put Perry’s re-election support at 33 percent, and the Zogby poll had his support at 31 percent.
“It’s hard to see him losing above 37 percent, but below 35 percent, somebody might get that much out of the remaining 65 percent of the vote,” said University of Houston pollster Richard Murray, a Democrat.
But Perry spokesman Robert Black said the polls paid for by news media companies should not be trusted because their methodology is not sound political science.
“All these media polls that promote the pollster should be taken with a grain of salt,” said Black. “If the campaigns, all the campaigns in this race for governor, thought these polls were worth a darn, they wouldn’t have their own pollsters.”
The polls differed on the challengers to Perry. Rasmussen had independent Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn in second place at 22 percent; Democrat Chris Bell in third place at 18 percent; and independent Kinky Friedman in fourth at 16 percent.
Zogby had Bell in second with 25 percent; Friedman at 22 percent, Strayhorn at 11 percent and Libertarian James Werner at 2.6 percent.
Both polls were conducted days before Perry and Strayhorn began their television advertising last week.
Black said the two polls do not accurately reflect the voting public in Texas. He said Rasmussen uses automated polling methods, while Zogby uses a pool of people who volunteer to be interviewed on an Internet site.
Surveys questioned
Mark Sanders, a spokesman for Strayhorn, touted the results of the Rasmussen poll while challenging the methodology of Zogby.”Zogby has always been wildly off when it comes to her (Strayhorn),” Sanders said. “The only polls we trust are the ones we take, and they show us in second place.”
Bell spokeswoman Heather Guntert said the campaign is not going to be one that “lives or dies” by any poll, but she said Zogby showed growing strength for Bell. She said that also is reflected in a $250,000 donation the campaign received from trial lawyer Harold Nix.
Murray said there are reasons to believe the Rasmussen and Zogby polls are credible and reasons to question their accuracy.
Murray said polls done with robotic interviewers such as those conducted by Rasmussen and SurveyUSA are considered to be “cheap, quick and dirty.” But he said they do so much polling that inaccuracies tend to level out over time. He said the hard thing for those polls to reflect is whether they are accurately sampling people who will actually vote.
Murray said Zogby’s polling methods called elections very accurately in 2000, but less so in 2004.
May not mean much
Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin and a founder of Pollster.com, said the biggest problem with Internet-based polling like Zogby’s is that the people who sign up to be surveyed are very interested in politics.Even if Zogby weights the population of the poll sample to reflect the population of the state, Franklin said a political survey of volunteers is likely one of people who already had strong feelings about politics and the candidates.
Franklin said there can be variability in any poll. So Perry’s drop may not mean much, especially if nothing happened to cause it, he said.
“Perry’s movement right now isn’t large enough for me to be convinced that Perry has dropped significantly,” Franklin said.
Friedman not worried
The one campaign not worried by the polls is that of Friedman, who is building his campaign like the one used by former wrestler Jesse Ventura to win the governorship in Minnesota.
“Jesse Ventura had 11 to 15 percent in the polls at this point in the campaign. He didn’t break 20 percent until the weekend before the election,” said Friedman spokeswoman Laura Stromberg. “This is great news.”