By Michael Bryan
New statewide polling from Lake Research Partners indicates possible trouble for Doug Ducey’s bid for re-election. I don’t have access to the raw polling data (though I would love to look…), so I can’t speak too much about the poll’s methodology, but some of the results have frankly surprised me. I do know that it seems to be appropriately weighted, included cell phones, and has a sample size of 600 respondents. Not bad.
Bottom line: Ducey is topping out a 40% against a generic Democratic opponent with a whopping 28% undecided, i.e. persuadable. 53% rate Ducey’s performance as merely fair or poor: and he only scores 49% good or excellent among GOP voters! His job performance in almost every other subject is also underwater, even traditional GOP strong subjects such as “keeping spending down” (I guess that is no longer a GOP value, actually, given national trends…):
Ducey will definitely face a real fight this season. That is likely the reason the Republican Governor’s Association is spending early and exclusively in Arizona (subscription link) to shore up a weakened Ducey.
So, bottom line: start investing in your favored Democratic candidate for Governor because the race is on, and Ducey is still crushing it comparatively in fund-raising. Check out our Democratic candidates Steve Farley, Kelly Fryer, and David Garcia.
You can read the full report here: PublicMemo.DuceyAccountability.firev1.0208181
Which gubernatorial races are likely to be the most competitive this year? The Republican Governors Association has invested $20 million in ad buys in four states: Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and Ohio.
Before you folks get too worked up, read this description of Lake Research Partners from Bloomberg:
“Sector: Communications
Industry: Media
Sub-Industry: Advertising & Marketing
Lake Research Partners, Inc. operates as a political strategy research firm. The Firm focuses on unions and labor for issues including minimum wages, retirement security, and health care, as well as women’s life for domestic violence and sexual assault, discrimination issues, and rights. Lake Research Partners serves customers in the United States.”
In other words, it is a left wing PR firm and not an unbiased polling company, which explains the weird results. The blogger might have thought to mention this.
Before you get too worked up, maybe you should go back a few posts and answer some questions asked of you.
I realize you don’t have answers so would rather not, I’m just thinking in the interest of continuity you may want to not do what you accuse others of doing.
Done
John, many polling firms lean to one side or the other, but as a seasoned politician you should know that their polls are not biased. Think about it. If you ran for an office that required polling, you would hire a conservative strategy firm and pay them to take polls for you. Would you want them to give you skewed poll results? How would that be serving you?
Celinda Lake is a highly respected pollster. The notion that she would rig a poll is absurd. You know how it works. If poll results are favorable, the client authorizes the pollster to release them. If they’re not favorable, the results remain confidential. So the publication of poll results is selective. But that doesn’t mean the poll results that are released are unreliable.
When I poll, I insist on reliable and valid polls. Why else would I spend the money. Regarding this poll, the results are so skewed that the background of the polling firm becomes suspect.
That aside, you Dems are in big trouble because you only have back benchers as candidates – the inevitable result of not having anyone in high office for a while.
Beyond that, no information is provided about the poll. Unless the poll was of high turnout voters, it is pretty useless.
Translation: “I, John Kavanagh, made a comment that I knew was pure BS when I made it, and got called on my BS.”
Time will tell but calling a comment BS is a pretty weak argument. But it certainly works here at BfA.
As a followup, new information on the poll reveals that of the 600 voters polled, only 4% were Republicans and about 32% Democrats, with the rest Independents, Libertarians, Greens or No Party Declared, presumably. From this grossly tilted sample the pollster assigns various subjective weights, which enables either gross error or purposeful distortion.
Show your work.
Also, wow, this one really got under your skin.
The polling company needs to show their work. Specifically, what weights they used. Their results are highly suspect and their weights are unknown.
Thanks to Ducey, Arizona is dead last nationwide in elementary school teacher pay and 49th in the country for secondary school teacher pay, according to Expect More Arizona. Gov. Ducey has proposed a Scroogelike .4 percent pay raise for teachers.
Funded by the anti-public-school Koch Brothers, Gov. Ducey has led the sabotage of the public school system. He is the worst governor the state has had in years and it’s time to get him out of office.
Readers should get behind Democratic candidates Steve Farley and David Garcia – see https://blogforarizona.net/governor-candidates-farley-and-garcia-will-restore-education-in-arizona/
There’s a dark money campaign underway to use cherry picked numbers to make Ducey’s education record look good.
Ducey loves dark money and the Koch’s. He looked completely inept on Sunday Square off a week or so ago.
The ads are pretty disgusting. Of course they don’t mention Ducey by name, just the amazing accomplishments. If I did’nt know better I would think they were written by the Huppster.
Frances, for the life of me, I don’t understand the conservative desire to pay teachers like McDonald’s workers.
Oh, yeah, they’re trying to destroy the teachers union for political reasons. A conservative will never miss a chance to ruin someone else’s life to further their ideology.
When I run the world, we’re going to train teachers like doctors and pay them accordingly.
I think that part of reasoning behind the McDonald’s pay scale for teachers is that conservatives don’t want their precious offspring to have competition from those they consider beneath. Hence, crappy pay for dedicated teachers with the hope that only the worse ones with no options remain which leads to poorer academic performance and fewer options for their students. Meanwhile said conservatives send their kids to the finest schools where they need not worry about being upstaged by those from the “lower classes”.
All part of Making America Great Again as we stifle what may be better minds from lower economic strata.
In the run-up to WWII, Japan would only accept pilot candidates from their upper classes, which did produce some pretty decent military pilots. As the war began the US was training pilots from diverse economic and societal levels. As Japan’s educated pilot resource dwindled, our pilot resource kept growing with trained & experience pilots.
As the war progressed Japan began losing their best pilots, and due to their recruiting practices, the applicant pool kept getting smaller and smaller with less trained & experienced pilots taking to the air and getting slaughtered by ours.
Just an illustration of how choking off education from all levels of society can strangle a nation.
Democratic/Independent readers and voters could also get behind gay woman candidate Kelly Fryer, who kicked off in January: https://blogforarizona.net/event/tucson-volunteer-kick-off-fryer-for-arizona/
Or Tucsonans can meet Kelly tonight at 5 p.m. Tap + Bottle: https://www.facebook.com/events/439472093140015/
Ads aren’t going to sway the people the way they used to. With social media and up-to-the-minute news, it’s much harder to cover up the fact that our tax dollars aren’t being spent the way we’ve voted. Teachers aren’t getting paid… in fact some kids don’t even get teachers. We have untrained business people teaching class part-time; 40 kids and more in a classroom. Our roads are terrible. We have to go out of our way to try finding a street that won’t tear up our tires and alignment – not to mention the number of pot holes that cause debris to fly up and crack the windshield of the car behind the first car. Our taxes are some of the highest in the country, but what do we get for them? No one wants to move here or bring their business here with the terrible schools, bad infrastructure, high taxes and low wages.
Then there’s the Right, making it sound like our city is on the verge of a crisis with drugs and illegal immigrants crossing the border in droves. The crisis isn’t with immigration. It’s with those who claim to represent us without listening to a word we say, or how we vote.
We often wonder who they represent or who they listen to, because it sure as hell isn’t anyone in their district. They seem to come from Mesa where all the former house speakers get their marching orders from Out of state interests, who transmit the orders to their minions. Been like that for years.