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Much as Peter Kinder would like to trust that Post-Dispatch late September poll that showed him leading Sam Page 51-35, even Kinder will admit that he doesn’t dare. For one thing, he knows how disastrously wrong the late July P-D poll showing Jeff Harris winning in the AG race was. (Were their pollsters filling their Dasani bottles with Absolut?) Kinder figures it’s unlikely that this P-D poll is any more reliable than the AG poll when he considers that his own internal poll shows him with a single digit lead.
“I have never believed that if as I expect McCain carries Missouri, it would necessarily mean anything down ballot,” he said. “So I am furiously paddling my own canoe.”
And McCain is looking less and less likely to do Kinder even that much good. The latest Fox News/Rasmussen poll has Obama up by three points (50-47) And the presidential matchup is the good news for Kinder. The bad news is the way that Sam Page is sandwiched in between Jay Nixon and Robin Carnahan on the ballot. The latest SUSA poll shows Jay walking away from Hulshof by 17 points. From Kinder’s point of view, that’s a big ouchie.
Whatever the Post-Dispatch may think, both these candidates believe it’s going to be a horse race with, who knows, maybe a photo finish.
From what I understand about the P-D poll, it’s an automated poll where a computer selects phone numbers at random from a list and calls with a recorded message prompting the recipient to answer by pressing keys on the phone, not just about candidate preference, but also about their demographic information.
So there’s a concern that the results can be flawed based on false reporting. A much bigger concern is that whoever is answering doesn’t know anything about the race (especially true of downballot races a month or more before the election), and just presses keys quickly in order to get off the phone.