By Michael Bryan
The Kelly campaign today leaked a poll by National Research which headlines him "beating" Ron Barber 49% to 45%.
The poll also indicates that he is the only GOP candidate who can do that. Imagine that. Barber beats Sitton and Antenori by a few points (43% to 39% and 46% to 40%) and ties with McSally (42% each).
The problem with that headline is the size of poll and the margin of error.
The poll is only 300 likely voters (with no note as to the party composition of the respondents – and thus totally irrelevant) with a MoE of a whopping +/- 5.66%.
That means that all the candidates are statistically tied. All of them. The poll is essentially meaningless. Anyone could win.
The touted 4 percent Kelly "win" is well within the MoE.
So what should the headline be?
Kelly Lies With Statistics.
In this showing that the poll is meaningless and anyone could win. I think we need to choose agency that are reliable to conduct research. Leakage is not tolerated, it is unfair.
It doesn’t take a super-sleuth to figure this out. National Research, Inc. lists its clients on its web site http://www.nationalresearchinc.com/clients/
Among its clients is Conservatives for Congress. You remember them from 2010, don’t you? http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2010/09/08/cd8-about-that-conservatives-for-congress-ad:
“The Conservatives for Congress Committee that helped carry Republican Jesse Kelly to victory in Congressional District 8 in last month’s primary has stopped airing a TV ad attacking Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.”
Tucson car dealer Steve Christy is chairman of the Conservatives for Congress Committee. “He sold his Tucson auto dealership in 2007 and now is getting involved in politics.”
Another tip from the TW article: “Christy says he agrees that the United States should import less oil—but the real solution to that is drilling more domestic oil. We have plenty of oil here—offshore, onshore, it can be drilled and refined if that were a part of the national agenda, which is definitely not the case today.” Christy must write Kelly’s material for him.
The only other poll leaked to the media in this race early on (before Antenori announced) was done by Citizens United, which then endorsed Jesse Kelly.
These are typical candidate push polls to make the candidate appear “inevitable” and the favorite. It’s not serious polling — if it was this “topline” poll number press release would provide information about its internals and methodology, and it does not.
Really. I find that very difficult to believe given how hard they are flacking it. If they didn’t pay for it, who did?
Only problem Mr. Bryan is that the Kelly campaign did not commission the poll.