Strike Everything

Rasmussen Reports isn’t regarded by most political insiders as the most accurate of firms, but no margin of error is likely to ease the blow its most recent poll delivered to Dean Martin and Buz Mills.

A Rasmussen poll released June 21 shows Gov. Jan Brewer with a whopping 61 percent of the Republican primary vote. Mills, who has spent more than $2.3 million in his pursuit of the Governor’s Office, pulled 16 percent, while Martin trailed at 12 percent. The automated telephone poll surveyed 707 likely primary voters on June 16.

Brewer’s numbers eclipsed the substantial lead she had in Rasmussen’s last poll in May, which showed her with 45 percent compared to Martin and Mills’ 18.

The three candidates were in a dead heat in March, when Rasmussen showed Mills with 21 percent, Brewer with 20 and Martin with 19. But the governor’s fortunes turned that month when the Legislature passed her budget plan and referred Proposition 100 to the ballot, and her approval numbers shot up after signing the strict illegal immigration law S1070.

Two percent of respondents said they would vote for another candidate – the fourth candidate in the race, Matthew Jette, was not included in the poll – and 9 percent said they weren’t sure who they would vote for.

Brewer had the highest favorability ratings of the three candidates, with 86 percent saying they had a very or somewhat favorable opinion of her, compared to 48 for Mills and 43 for Martin. Mills had the highest unfavorable rating at 30 percent, though Martin was close behind with 28 percent, while Brewer had 13 percent.

Much of the poll focused on voter attitudes toward illegal immigration, an issue that has put Brewer at the top of most polls conducted since she signed S1070 on April 23. In the poll, 89 percent of respondents said they supported S1070, with only 8 percent opposing it, and 77 percent said S1070 would be “very important” in determining who they voted for.

-Jeremy Duda

Attorney General Terry Goddard said he will support Proposition 100, ending months of fence-sitting on the temporary sales tax increase.

Goddard, the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, announced his support in a Mother’s Day email blast to his supporters.

“It’s a day for making sure that kids, all kids, are treated right. In our household, Monica makes it clear that means pushing to pass Prop 100 on May 18,” Goddard wrote in the email, referring to his wife.

In February, Goddard told the ~Arizona Capitol Times~ that he did not know how he would vote on the issue, and the following month he said he could not support Prop 100 without an assurance from Gov. Jan Brewer that she would veto H2250, which included a host of corporate tax cuts that would have started phasing in while the three-year sales tax hike was still on the books.

H2250, referred to by supporters as the “jobs bill,” passed in the House but died in the Senate, where President Bob Burns expressed concerns about passing tax cuts while the state was still experience massive revenue shortfalls. Brewer had also said she did not want the tax cuts to go into effect until the sales tax hike expired, and she released a separate “jobs package” that did not included any tax cuts.

“Since the governor has capitulated to the attorney general’s call that we not tax working families and then shovel that money to corporations, he’s decided to support Prop 100,” said Goddard campaign manager Rodd McLeod. “It’s not the best choice for dealing with Arizona’s deficit, but it’s the only choice we’ve got in the short term.”

Voters will decide on Prop 100 in a May 18 special election. The temporary sales tax increase is expected to raise about $900 million per year, nearly half of which will go to K-12 education.

-Jeremy Duda

Another week, another press release touting poll results that can’t be truly judged by the Fourth Estate because a campaign won’t release any of the data that goes along with the poll other than what they want reported.

The irony of the latest poll is that it was conducted by Moore Information, whose owner, Bob Moore, was one of my sources in an item last week about the information reporters need to be more vigilant in gathering before writing about polls.

Today’s poll was released by Yes on 100, the campaign committee that is stumping for the temporary one-cent sales tax increase lawmakers referred to the ballot for a May 18 special election. The press release said the poll, which was conducted in late February – though the release didn’t note the days, Moore told me it was done Feb. 24 and 25 – shows 59 percent of likely voters support the tax increase.

To its credit, the campaign released the poll question asked of the 506 voters who self-identified as certain or likely to vote in the May election. That poll question is the exact ballot language that voters will see in a couple of months:

A ‘yes’ vote shall have the effect of temporarily increasing the state transaction privilege sales and use tax by one cent per dollar for three years to fund primary and secondary education, health and human services and public safety.

A ‘no’ vote shall have the effect of keeping the state transaction privilege sales and use taxes at their current levels.”

But, as with the polls I examined in last week’s blog post, the campaign refused to provide a copy of the script of the entire survey or cross-tabs. Moore gave me some of the demographic information, including a breakdown of respondents by age and party affiliation, but the data can still be summed up with one word: incomplete.

There were other questions asked to voters, but Yes on 100 spokesman David Leibowitz wouldn’t release them to one of my colleagues who spoke with him today. We don’t know how many questions they asked, what they asked or even why. It’s likely the questions were done to help shape the campaign’s strategy in the coming weeks by testing possible messages, but we don’t know if it was limited to that. We have to take Moore and the campaign at their words when they say none of the other questions asked would have an impact on how the respondents view the ballot measure.

Frankly, that’s not out of the ordinary. Campaigns often do polling to gather data that will be used to guide strategy decisions in the run up to the election. But the information gleaned from those polls, and the results themselves, are used internally and not made public. And that’s well and good.

But by offering a portion of the survey for public consumption, they want the best of both worlds. The campaign expects reporters to take that bit of the poll it wants to tout publicly and cover it, but they refuse to release the complete poll. They can’t have it both ways.

Or maybe they can, if the media is willing to be complicit. Polls are like candy to political junkies, and it’s tough not to report on them. It’s no secret why reporters and those who follow politics gravitate to them.

Already, my Capitol press corps colleague Dennis Welch, of The Arizona Guardian, has written about the poll without questioning the lack of supporting information that should come with a poll. Others haven’t yet written about the poll results, but they may. And it will be a journalistic sin to not call attention to two things in the stories: The campaign paid for the poll, and they refuse to release the data needed to fairly judge the validity of the results.

It’s possible the poll is entirely accurate. Moore has a sterling reputation nationally as a pollster and a poll he did on the sales tax increase last summer showed what I believe were the most unbiased results of any of the polls conducted last year. That poll, which was done in June 2009, showed 64 percent of likely voters supported the sales tax increase for education and public safety.

Why was it the best poll on the subject last year? Because it was an independent poll. There were also polls done by backers and opponents of the tax increase, but both were suspect because of who paid for them. When I asked Moore about the poll last year, he said he did it to try to drum up business in Arizona, a state where he hadn’t worked before. At that time, he readily produced full cross-tabs and information on the poll.

But this is a different situation. This poll is paid for by the campaign and, as such, is their property. Whether Moore wanted to or not, he couldn’t release the data to me or any other reporter, as long as the campaign doesn’t twist the data or publicly mischaracterize what it said.

The campaigns, though, need to be confronted with a skeptical Arizona media that refuses to lap up whatever numbers they put out as poll results if they aren’t willing to give us the information we need to properly evaluate the results. If that happens, Arizona will be all the better for it.

- By Jim Small