The Wick/Inside Tucson Business Poll for the CD 8 Congressional Race

I’ve been reluctant to post on this topic because it has been so widely covered in the blogs already, I didn’t want to pile on, I really had nothing to add: the poll’s implications are pretty obvious. That, and I was hoping to squeeze more internals from the poll out of Jim Nintzel. No such luck on that score, though I continue to hope he’ll take pity on a poor blogger (he actually –  teasingly, I assume – told me to go sponsor my own poll). But now that things have settled down a bit, there are a few things I think worth writing about.

The first and most obvious is the sea-change in Conventional Wisdom that this poll has brought about. Giffords and Graf are now clearly established, just weeks out from the primary, as the leaders, if not nominees presumptive, in the race. No more speculations about who’s got what internal poll and how valid they are. Everyone now has one presumptively valid poll to work from.

I have to say that it was very clever of Giffords’ staff to withhold her internal polls if they showed her in the lead, which I’ve been told they did. Having a independent poll first verify this fact tremendously stregthened her position, and allowed her to present an apparent tremendous surge ahead of Weiss giving her enourmous momentum at a critical time.

Weiss and her campaign are no doubt dispirited and scrambling to find out why their own polling varied so radically from this one. Latas’ campaign must know by now that their odd methodology of a house to house straw poll misled them to wildly over-estimate their support – though I think this poll might understate support for Latas significantly, it is not off by the orders of magnitude needed to make Jeff the nominee. Likewise, It is possible that given the fairly small, but statistically valid, sample size of 300 respondants per party, that the support for all of the single digit candidates (Latas, Rodriguez, Shacter, and Johnson) is significantly off, but that won’t have any impact on the outcome of the race. The Democratic contest is clearly between Giffords and Weiss, and Giffords is clearly the front-runner.

Given the strength of the immigration issue in the Democratic crosstabs, Johnson could end up with a much larger slice of the Democratic vote than predicted in this poll. But my sense of immigration concerns on the Democratic side of the aisle is that we tend to address underlying problems, wish to stop the exploitation of foriegn and domestic labor, and want to integrate these new immigrants into mainstream America, we do not want to deport all undocumented immigrants or to build a big wall. Johnson’s approach will turn off Democrats, even if many feel the issue he is running on is important.

On the Republican side of aisle, the Graf campaign must be jubilent. Their faith in their central message of cracking down on immigration has clearly been vindicted. With crosstabs on the Republican primary voters placing immigration as the most important primary issue with an astounding 60%, there is simply no downside in this poll for Graf.

The moderate wing of the party is in a rout. Hellon and Huffman are clearly splitting the vote. With Huffman’s dirty pool against Graf and the peeping scandal in his campaign, I think Republicans have had about enough from Mr Huffman, who was never popular to begin with. He seems to have moved ahead quite substantially from prior polling I’ve seen, picking up as much as 10 points. But as this poll was conducted mid August, I think we’re looking at peak numbers for Huffman. Hellon will be the natural beneficiary of roll-off from Huffman. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the kind of resources that have been entrusted to Huffman, and so all the financial power of the moderate Republican faction is sitting in a sinking boat. So, row as he might, Hellon can’t afford the outboard media motor that could help him catch Graf.

I think Hellon has been very clever at exploiting the obvious tension between Graf and Huffman, but even as Huffman’s campaign takes on water, Huffman has enought hands on board to help him bail. Only if Huffman drops out of the race, possibly due to further scandal more central to his campaign, and/or endorses Hellon, will Hellon be able to unify enough of the antipathy to Graf to win. I can’t predict what the final percentages between Hellon and Huffman will be, but only when combined will they exceed Graf.

Again, the single digit candidates (Jenkins, Antenori) haven’t the resources to make any significant movement, if they were to break out, they would have already done so. Antenori’s book release and publicity, which is much more free media than most candidates get, hasn’t moved him in the polls. I think this poll, as I said for the Democrats, may understate the single-digit candidates’ share of the vote. But it is virtually certain that they do not have a chance of prevailing. Like their Democratic counterparts, the biggest impact they will have on the race now is by shaping the debate, challenging the front-runners to clarify their positions, and by their endorsements.

I still haven’t seen as much of the poll’s guts as I would like, but what has been written about leads me to believe that there aren’t any gross inaccuracies in the poll, though I can’t be certain about the framing of the sample universe. The single thing that nettles me is the wild disparity between Democratic undecideds and Republican undecideds. The Republicans have candidates who have very clear differences on many issues. The Democrats have candidates whose positions on the issues are much harder to distinguish. Between the two groups, one would expect the Democrats to be having more difficulty in choosing a candidate than Republicans. Yet almost twice as many Republicans are undecided as Democrats. While with the realm of the possible, it just doesn’t make sense to me.

Why are there vastly fewer Democratic undecideds than Republicans? One answer could be the prevalence of negative campaigning on the Republican side. Many Republicans could have an inclination to support a candidate, but the negative attacks coming from a camp, or the negative hits that stuck to a camp, could be keeping them on the fence. Or the anomality could be coming from Democrats. Giffords has a great deal of money and has put out a great deal of high-quality and very compelling media. Her commericals and mailings are simply better done than those of the other campaigns, and people have seen more of them.

I did the Mom test the other day. My mother stays at home watching the grandkids most days, and she watches a lot of local television in the process. She has seen lots of Giffords ads, but none of Weiss’. As a result, she has a very positive view of Giffords and says she "would probably vote for her." What the Mom test suggests is that a lot of Gabby’s support could be of this sort. Due to her greter media reach, people have heard more about her and she’s converting votersp; even if they are not terribly invested in their support for her, they are willing to vote for her.

Most likely, it is a combination of these two factors – negative media on the Republican side, and positive media on the Democratic side – that accounts for the counter-intuitive gap bewteen Republican and Democratic undecideds. But it suggests a dynamic for the rest of both races. Republicans will be struggling to get voters off the fence and into their camp with more positive messages (except for Huffman, perhaps), and Democrats will be seeking to give voters a reason to climb off Gabby’s bandwagon (which means that Democrats, especially Weiss, may start moving toward much more overt ‘contrast’ messaging).

Unless Hellon and Huffman tie the knot and combine their forces, Graf looks likely to win. Unless Gabby is knocked off her media-supported wave of popular support by Weiss or other candidates, she looks likely to win.

There are many who question who would win in a match-up between Graf and Giffords. I’m not one of them; I think there is no doubt that the princess would slay the troll.