Polls: The Fix is In

It looks from here like Public Policy Polling is working for John Boozman in the U.S. Senate race. I say this on the basis of their recent poll results where they start by saying "John Boozman will enter the Arkansas Senate race this weekend as the frontrunner." They say this as if he had no primary opponents. Its true that he has a large lead over the unpopular Senator Blanche Lincoln (Sellout, AR), but one little problem. They did not poll Lincoln against any of her other Republican opponents! Or if they did, they dared not release the results.

************UPDATE*********UPDATE***********UPDATE
Looks like they DID poll Lincoln against "little-known State Senator Gilbert Baker, viewed as the GOP frontrunner before Boozman's entry, leads Lincoln by a 50-35 margin." That little snippet was in this more obscure PDF. The-name-they dare-not-mention (Holt Holt Holt Holt Holt) is who I considered the frontrunner, since the only poll which compared both Holt and Baker to Lincoln had Holt beating her by a wider margin.
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The failure of Public Policy Polling to compare Boozman-Lincoln with Holt-Lincoln makes the poll more valuable as a propaganda tool for John Boozman and the DC based GOP than it does anything else. All it tells us is what every other poll for the last four months has told us- about anyone can beat Blanche Lincoln. Even they give this away when they admit, "Boozman’s strong early standing probably has more to do with voters strongly disliking
Lincoln than necessarily liking him."

Then there is the issue of his high negatives-"Boozman is not all that well known- a 43% plurality of the state's voters have no opinion about him one way or the other..... Among those who do 32% view him favorably to 25% unfavorably."

That favorable to unfavorable ratio is significantly lower than that of any other Republican candidate in the race (I guess the people who DO know him know about his support of the Big Banker Bailouts). His favorable to unfavorable ratio is 1.28 while every other candidate on the Republican side has a favorable to unfavorable ratio higher than two. Jim Holt for example has a ratio of 2.71 while Gilbert Baker is at 2.2. Clearly, among people who know Boozman, there is a much higher percentage of people who view him unfavorably compared to his two main rivals. Boozman also ranked behind Holt in total name ID 54-62. Those figures are from two different polls, since PPP was pretending that there were no other Republicans in the race against Lincoln, still the gap is significant.

The Morning News had Mason-Dixon conduct a poll that actually included Jim Holt. This poll showed Holt had the widest margin of any of the other candidates against Lincoln. The poll had the race closer than the Rasmussen polls have had them, but Holt and Baker still came out ahead of Lincoln, Holt up by seven and Baker up by five. The lesser known candidates were a little behind Lincoln in this poll.

Even though the Morning News paid for the poll, they blew their coverage of it. The guy who made the graph reversed Holt's numbers so it looked like he was the worst candidate against Lincoln when in fact he was the strongest. Is the fix in? Is it a conspiracy or simple incompetence? Hey newspapers in this state, please do something to make us believe that you are playing it straight!

Then comes the new Rasmussen poll. For a long time the Holt camp complained that Rasmussen did not include Holt in their polls. Critics countered that Holt had not yet announced. So he announced. A new Rasmussen poll comes out. Holt is still not in the poll, but John Boozman, who has not yet announced, is in the poll. This one showed that Boozman's spread over Lincoln was no greater than Gilbert Baker's. That lends more credence to the idea that the PPP poll was skewed toward Boozman.

So am I crazy to say the fix is in or is it crazy to deny it? Time after time one thing after another keeps skewing coverage so that the citizens of this state are repeatedly denied access to this one critical piece of information: Jim Holt is currently the strongest candidate for U.S. Senate. You have to go to a blog like this one to actually be able to look at the links and put the facts together.

At least that Rasmussen poll compared Boozman to SOME other GOP contenders. And the results of the poll showed that, contrary to the PPP's contentions, that Gilbert Baker had just as big a spread against Lincoln as Boozeman did. Of course in the Mason-Dixon poll, the only one that dared mention the existence of Holt, Holt had a spread two points greater than Baker. So if Baker ties Boozman and Holt beats Baker then does that mean........

Why yes it does Virginia. But you have to go here to read it.

PS- Holt even out-raised "frontrunner" Boozman last quarter.

PSS- If you want to hear audio of your humble reporter "going off" on Boozman for his defense of his loathsome bailout vote then click here.

"Internal Poll" on GOP Senate Primary

Stephens Media contracted reputable pollster Mason-Dixon to conduct a poll on the GOP Senate nomination. The poll showed Boozman leading, and threatening a win without a run-off with 48%. Outsider Jim Holt surged to second place with 17%. The insider's former horse in the race (before Boozman was enticed in because I suspect that they realized Baker was not doing the job of stopping Holt) is Senator Gilbert Baker. He dropped to 11% in this poll. None of the other candidates, outsiders all, are even close to double digits.

In an effort to counteract the disaster that this poll represents for the Baker campaign, they released the results of their own "internal poll". They claim it showed 44% Boozman, 22% Baker, and 8% Holt. Bwahahahahahahah. Right.

In honor of their creativity, I am releasing my own "internal poll" on the race. It has a margin of error of about 18 inches, since that is the approximate width of my body trunk. Bear in mind this poll has every bit as much validity as the one the Baker campaign released, and even more credibility because I am not insulting your intelligence by asking you to buy it.

Anyway, in this poll it is Holt that has the 22% and Baker that has the 8%. Notice that the results of my little "internal poll" are much closer to the results of those from the reputable polling firm of Mason-Dixon than is the "internal poll" released by the Baker camp.

One big difference is that in my "internal poll" there is almost no support for Boozman, except for a small area in the exact center of my body. This fits what I know about Boozman being the candidate of the insiders. The rest of Boozman's support comes from uninformed voters. They don't know about his votes for the bailouts, the massive spending votes, and they don't know he has become a Washington Insider, the GOP's Blanche Lincoln. Since every single part of my body is highly informed, that section of Boozman's support did not show up in my "internal poll."

Baker's support was concentrated in my lower intestines, particularly among those who may develop into colon polyps. About 12-24 hours after a big meal, Baker's support increases because of what I get more full of.

Holt's support is very strong in my heart and my head, but the majority in my internal poll tell me that Washington is so messed up that I better not get wrapped up on the idea that any of these guys can or will "fix it."

Polls: The Fix is Still In

*******UPDATE **** UPDATE *** UPDATE******
Looks like my source was mis-informed, or Rasmussen changed their mind. Holt is in the latest poll, which also polls against Halter. Boozman and Holt poll best against Lincoln, with a nine and seven point spread respectively. The others trail. Boozman polls strongest in the unlikely prospect that Halter wins.
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Subject: US Senate GOP Primary polling: I reported to you earlier about the strange series of odd coincidences concerning polls which had the effect of pumping up Congressman John "Bailout" Boozman and downplaying the strength of outsider former State Senator Jim Holt.

After Rasmussen left him off of their poll last time the firm was apparently deluged with complaints. Their last poll included Boozman even though he had not yet declared, and also included Tom Cox who has since dropped out of the race.

With all of those complaints, and the disproportionate treatment, and the opening up of a spot due to the loss of Cox, I thought we would finally get to see a poll which compared the relative strengths of Holt to the others. Nope. It seems the fix is still in. After doing a poll at least every month for the last four months, "the powers that be" at Rasmussen have decided to SKIP POLLING FOR MARCH according to a usually reliable source. This will "lock in" the perceptions of Bailout as the leading candidate, which was the template they seem to want to impose on the data.

Jim Holt Does Not Exist

The DC Establishment is "The Eraser".
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Again Jim Holt gets left out of a poll, this one sponsored by the left-wing Daily KOS. This seems to be a recurring theme with these polls. I reported earlier that the fix was in on the polling. In that one, they polled Boozman vs. Lincoln even before Bailout announced (along with the establishment's previous choice Baker) but did not include Holt. Rasmussen was also very slow to poll Holt. After Rasmussen was deluged with complaints, they did include Holt in one poll, but that was after initially telling the Holt campaign that they simply would skip polling that month.

Now it happens again. Holt, who polls as well or better against Lincoln than anyone else in the race, was left out of the KOS poll even though the poll did test Lincoln against TOM COX who dropped out of the race weeks ago! This is ridiculous. Its absurd. It feeds right into the hypothesis that both DC based political parties are funded by the same global interests. They tell America who the "acceptable" candidates are, and the American people will be chastised and ridiculed by their henchmen if they go outside the lines!

Conspiracies happen, but it does not have to be a conspiracy. They just have their own insulated group who talk among themselves. They ask each other in the Beltway "who should we poll against Lincoln?" And Holt is not on the Beltway's radar. These other folks seem to be. That in itself ought to tell you something.