Before I went to bed last night, I saw that two polls had been released, both of which indicated that Rep. Ed Markey has a strong lead in his campaign to win John Kerry’s seat in the U.S. Senate. The special election will take place on the 25th of June. When I woke up, however, I was confronted with a poll that says the race is a statistical tie. Of course, that is at variance with most polls, which show Markey with a double-digit lead.
The Republicans have two ways of dealing with polling numbers that they don’t like. The first is to assert some kind of hidden bias or “skew” in the polls. In other words, the polls are wrong and the GOP will do much better than predicted. The second strategy is to produce their own polls, which invariably show them doing better than the findings of reputable pollsters.
This is quite different from how Democrats operate. Democrats monkey around with polls, too, but not in such an egregious way. Democratic politicians hire their own pollsters, but they tend not to release their findings unless they are favorable. You can tell that a Democrat is losing if they don’t rebut unfavorable polls with their own internal polling.
Polling firms that do internal polling are under pressure to show good results, which is why internal polling is inherently less reliable than independent polling. But Democrats do not systematically solicit nakedly fraudulent polling, nor do they routinely disparage independent polling as skewed. I won’t say that it never happens, but it certainly isn’t routine.
The Republicans are beginning to pay a price for the way they treat polls.
Massachusetts Republican Senate candidate Gabriel Gomez is facing an unsettling dilemma going into the final stretch of the special election campaign.
Gomez needs the support of big-spending outside GOP groups and donors to win, but those groups and donors are holding back until he proves he can win.
How do you “prove” that you can win? You produce polls showing that you are in a dead heat. Literally nothing else will do the job. The problem is that Republicans tried that strategy with Mitt Romney and Republican donors now realize that they were lied to and fleeced of their money. Outlier polls that give a false sense of optimism are no longer believed.
The GOP is the party that cried wolf.
