Latest Fifth District Polling

Over the weekend, the Lowell Sun reported on a Fifth District Congressional poll taken by candidate and fomer Lowell Mayor Eileen Donoghue. The poll shows Donoghue second behind Niki Tsongas, but by a smaller margin than a similar poll taken in early May. Here are the results for the whole district:

Tsongas	25.7%
Donoghue	16.8%
Finegold	12.9%
Eldridge	10.0%
Miceli	3.8%
Undecided	29.0%

Donoghue's poll also showed her winning Lowell with 35.4% and with six points of Tsongas in Greater Lowell. The only candidate from the Southern end of the District, Rep. Jamie Eldridge, apparently does best in that region, though he still is behind Tsongas 20.7% to 26.6% in that region. Of course, given that the poll as a whole has a margin of error of 4%, the subsamples will have a much smaller sample size and have an even larger MOE. It's not clear how useful any of those individual regional numbers might be since we don't know the regional breakdown of the poll.

Of course, the usual caveats apply to this data because it is an internal poll, paid for by one of the candidates. It's true that Donoghue would benefit from having an accurate picture of the electorate as it stands now, but it's also true that her team has control over the questions and the decision whether or not to release these numbers. It's interesting that this poll was done by a different firm than the last one, which makes me wonder whether she is commissioning multiple polls at a time and only releasing the ones that show the most favorable results. In addition, there's no indication of how the questions were asked and what information led up to the selection of a candidate. I know that some polls in low-profile races give short bios of each candidate before asking the respondent to choose one. That may not be the case in this poll, but the Sun article makes no mention either way.

In the end, what the poll really shows is that more people are undecided than support any particular candidate. That may mean that the race is more up-for-grabs than the Tsongas team would like. Of course, what will really matter is which candidate can drag their supporters out to a special election the day after Labor Day. It seems to me that the undecideds will be less likely to schlep out to vote and that number is only important insofar as one candidate or another can gain the support of people who have not yet made up their minds. That may be a tough job over the summer when so many people are on vacation and thinking of other things than politics.

Good News From the North

Via Political Wire, American Research Group released a poll today showing former New Hampshire Governor and current director of the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics Jeanne Shaheen thumping incumbent New Hampshire Senator John Sununu in a rematch of their 2002 race by a margin of 57% to 29% with 14% undecided. Check out the by-party numbers:

	Shaheen	Sununu	Undecided
Republicans	30%	61%	9%
Democrats	96%	1%	3%
Undeclared	50%	25%	25%

Shaheen not only gets virtually every Democrat, but even thirty percent of Republicans are, at this early point, so turned off of Sununu that they plan to vote for his opponent! That's incredible.

Now, the usual caveats apply. It's an early poll and doesn't reflect what's likely to happen over the course of a campaign and furthermore Shaheen has not yet even announced her intention to run, and it's an open question whether she will. Still, seeing these numbers, I'd be surprised if she didn't try to take a little revenge at the guy who beat her (by cheating) five years ago.

Recent Polling in Context

Over at Media Nation, Dan Kennedy has beat me to a comparision of Mitt Romney and Deval Patrick's poll numbers at similar points in their terms. Much has been made of the recent Globe and State House News polls, and I think Kennedy has put them in the proper perspective by matching Romney's numbers from 2003 to Patrick's this year. Here's his summary:

At roughly the same point in their governorships, they were in a similar position with respect to public perceptions. Patrick is better liked. Although a higher percentage of respondents approved of Romney's job performance, a higher percentage disapproved, too. Apparently more people are watching and waiting with Patrick.

Each governor dug himself into something of a whole rather quickly. As we know, Romney never dug himself out — and, after a while, he stopped trying, as he decided to run for president by making fun of Massachusetts rather than govern.

I don't have too much to add about the polling, though I think it's safe to say that the results are better than they could be, but certainly worse than the administration wants. It's also funny to me to see Republicans now claim Governor Patrick's favorability rating (which is still relatively high) is meaningless when they were clinging to Governor Romney's relatively high favorability rating just over a year ago when they claimed that Romney would be overwhelmingly reelected.

Update: Afertig over at BMG makes a similiar point and presents a 2003 review of Mitt Romney's first 100 days from the Boston Phoenix.

Strange Robo-Poll

I just got a strange robo poll on the Massachusetts governor's race. It was a woman's recorded voice asking if I support Deval Patrick to press one; Chris Gabrieli, press two; Tom Reilly, three; undecided four. I pressed one and got a "thank you" and a dial tone. No demographic questions at all. No real survey would omit those.

I'm wondering what would have happened if I had chosen another candidate. Is someone testing their own messages or would I have heard something negative about one of the candidates?

Anyone else get one of these and try something different?

SUSA Poll Trend Lines

Blue Mass. Group points to the August SUSA poll, the first one of its kind since the tragic ceiling collapse in the I-90 tunnel. Deval Patrick still leads with 35%, followed by Chris Gabrieli with 30% and Tom Reilly with 27%. The race appears to be tightening slightly from last month. Here are the trendlines:

One interesting thing to note about the SUSA poll: aside for the month of May, shortly after Gabrieli went on the air, Deval Patrick has stayed at almost the same level of support since March -- between 35 and 37 percent. That is not completely surprising to me, but you would think after all this time there would be some movement in one direction or the other. As for the other candidates, Chris Gabrieli has to be happy with his continued upward trend, and Attorney General Tom Reilly's downward slide seems to have leveled off for the time being.

By the way, CBS4's Jon Keller makes the following statement on his blog:

In the last few days, I've had the chance to discuss the Democratic gubernatorial primary with two experienced political operatives, one a liberal Democrat, the other a conservative Republican, whose opinions I respect. Both have said the same thing -- they think Deval Patrick may already have the votes in hand to win this race. Even a math idiot such as yours truly can do the arithmetic -- in a three-way race, 33% plus one vote wins. Today's CBS4 Fast Track is just the latest in a series of polls to show Patrick at or over the 33% mark, and the man has yet to spend a dime on TV ads.

It's not quite that simple; just getting a third of the vote does not guarantee a win. No matter how big the field is, the only way to be absolutely certain of victory is with 50% + 1. For example, let's say that Patrick gets his 33.4% of the vote, the remaining 66.6% need not be distributed equally -- Gabrieli might get 35.3% with Reilly getting 31.3%. In a race this tight, those numbers are not far fetched, either.

Put another way, the general is going to be a three way race. Does anyone really think that the winner in November will only need 33% of the vote?

Patrick Leads First State House News Poll

Holy cow. The State House News has released the internals and the executive summary of their bi-monthly poll, and the results are a big surprise. For the first time in that poll, not only does Democratic candidate Deval Patrick lead the primary, but also polls the highest against Republican Kerry Healey.

The usual caveats apply to the Statehouse News poll. It's a poll of residents, so by the time you drill down to registered Democratic primary voters, the sample size is much smaller and the margins of error are much higher. Still, it's valuable to look at the trends -- and they continue to be bad for Attorney General Tom Reilly. Here are the results of the poll since January.

Reilly has lost 40 points in this poll since the beginning of the year. He may end up winning the primary after all is said and done, but this trend has been fairly steady and replicated in almost every poll done over the course of the year.

Here are the results for the general election, with the May Results in parentheses.

	Chris Gabrieli		Deval Patrick		Tom Reilly
Democrat	38.60%	(37.0%)	40.10%	(29.2%)	36.30%	(38.0%)
Kerry Healey	30.30%	(31.2%)	30.50%	(31.1%)	31.30%	(29.9%)
Christy Mihos	9.20%	(10.4%)	9.30%	(14.5%)	12.60%	(12.9%)
Grace Ross	3.10%	(NA)	1.70%	(NA)	3.20%	(NA)
None/other	6.70%	(5.9%)	6.70%	(7.2%)	5.90%	(6.2%)
Don't Know	11.40%	(15.2%)	11.40%	(17.4%)	10.60%	(13.0%)

Notice again the big jump for Deval Patrick since May. Patrick beats Kerry Healey for the first time in this poll since January -- before Christy Mihos and Chris Gabrieli were poll options. The other candidates remain mostly unchanged.

The poll also asked about the most important problem facing Massachusetts today. Here are the results of that, sorted by the response of the unenrolled voters, with "other" and "don't know" removed:

	Total	Unenrolled	Democrat	Republican
Taxes	18.80%	18.00%	16.50%	27.80%
Education	14.20%	14.70%	21.70%	3.70%
Health care	7.40%	8.20%	8.40%	1.80%
The economy	6.50%	5.30%	8.30%	1.80%
Affordable housing	5.70%	4.10%	7.50%	3.80%

I'm not surprised to see "taxes" as the number one issue, though "education" -- often a top contender -- is number two among independents. I'm wondering if the recent discussions of the state budget, which have largely focused on state spending, have moved taxes to the forefront of the voters' minds. Still, I can't help but feel that it's the property tax that hurts more than the state income tax. Don't make the mistake of thinking that the tax issue is just about the rollback. There's a whole package of taxes and fees that people have to pay, and unlike the payroll tax, those are things you actually have to make out a check for. It's also about trust. Will voters trust a Democrat to lower their taxes, no matter what he says his position is? That's the danger whether you're talking about lowering the income tax rate to 5.0% or lowering the property taxes -- will voters believe it? On top of that, the legislature is viewed unfavorably by two-thirds of the population. Does it even matter what a gubernatorial candidate says about taxes if people think the legislature is unlikely to do anything about them?

Suffolk Poll Shows Race Tightening Further

Suffolk University released their 7NEWS/Suffolk poll yesterday. The full results are now online and are very interesting to poll junkies like me. Deval Patrick for the first time is ahead in this poll, and has seen his "never heard of" numbers drop to a low of 20%. The fact that he's ahead despite having the lowest name recognition is amazing to me. Here are the current Democratic primary numbers:

Deval Patrick	31%
Tom Reilly	25%
Chris Gabrieli	22%
Undecided	21%

This poll has quite a few more numbers of undecided voters than the Survey USA poll because it's asking a different question. While Survey USA told respondents to imagine themselves in the voting booth, the Suffolk poll asked "At this point, toward whom would you lean?". Here is a graph of the Suffolk primary numbers so far:
The graph clearly shows the trend for Reilly is not what he wants to see, while the trends for Patrick and Gabrieli are favorable to them. Note also how closely clustered together they all are. The candidates are separated by only nine percentage points in a poll that has a margin of error of +/- 5.26% and a fifth of the voters undecided. Right now the primary is wide open.

The poll also has some interesting questions. Democratic primary voters would prefer to invite Deval Patrick "over to their house for dinner" (30%) but they'd rather trust their household budget to Chris Gabrieli (25%) and they think Tom Reilly (22%) would best understand their healthcare issue. If their child was looking for career advice, respondents are equally likely to ask all three candidates. In a show of unity, over 83% also said that if their candidate for Governor loses, they are at least somewhat likely to vote for the Democratic nominee.

The poll also asked about the Lieutenant Governor primary, where Undecided is poised to walk away with the election -- 79% have yet to pick a favorite in that race.

In the General, all three candidates beat Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey. Be sure to check out Kerry Healey -- Out of Touch for reaction to those numbers. The poll also asked about the down-ballot races and the various ballot initiatives. The only one of those that fails is the one sponsored by Mass Ballot Freedom that would bring New York-style fusion balloting to Massachusetts. Voters otherwise seem particularly ready to amend the state Constitution to require health insurance access be available, to ban dog racing and dog fighting, and to allow food stores to sell wine, among other initiatives. Suffolk has a handy chart that sums up support for all the proposed questions. In addition, a plurality, 41%, of poll respondents indicated that they favored recognition of legal marriage between couples of the same sex, and another 32% said they would be OK with civil unions.

Patrick Maintains Lead In New Poll

CBS4 has released new poll by Survey USA on the Democratic primary. Here are the current results with the April results, also from SUSA, in parentheses:

Patrick	36%	(36%)
Reilly	31%	(33%)
Gabrielli	23%	(19%)
Undecided	9%	(11%)

Looking at the cross tabs, I'm not sure I would go so far as Herald reporter Kim Atkins, who says that Young people love Reilly, poor people like Gabrieli. Keep in mind that the margins of error for those subsamples are 11 and 10.5 respectively. One thing that is statistically significant, is Deval Patrick's 12 point lead over Tom Reilly amongst Democrats. The breakdown for Dems is Patrick 39%, Reilly 27%, Gabrieli 23%, with a MoE of 5.7. This is a steep drop from April for Reilly who had the support of 34% of Democrats in that poll. Reilly does, however, lead among Independents likely to vote in the Democratic primary with 39%, to Patrick's 30% and Gabrieli's 25%, and an MoE of 8.4.

There are things to be happy about for each campaign. Reilly can point to his Independent support, which he actually lost in April. Gabrieli saw his numbers go up slightly since April. While Patrick did not get the kind of convention bump that Shannon O'Brien did four years ago, he can take heart that Gabreili's media campaign has not affected his poll numbers.

One thing that I do want to point out again is the danger of internal polls. If you recall, the Gabrieli campaign released a poll just before the convention showing that Gabreili was leading with 33% of the vote, followed by Reilly and then Patrick. People who are not well versed in polls might think that Gabreili has plummeted ten points since the convention. This is not the case, of course, because the internal poll and the SUSA poll likely had widely different methodologies.

[UPDATE]: A commenter at Blue Mass. Group reminded me of the May SUSA poll which I somehow forgot. Here are the trends, including the May results and the March poll, which did not include Gabrieli:

Gabrieli's Boomerang Poll

The Gabrieli campaign this week gave us a textbook example of how to leak a poll to the media. They conducted an internal poll that showed Chris Gabrieli taking the lead in the Democratic primary against Attorney General Tom Reilly and Deval Patrick. Now, since this is an internal poll, it means we the public do not get to see what questions were asked, what types of people responded, or if the sample was at all biased. This was a poll not meant to measure opinion, but meant to convince people that Chris Gabrieli deserves to be on the ballot. So, with that in mind, the campaign leaked the poll to the media, and CBS4's Jon Keller and the Globe's Frank Phillips write about it as if it were news. The campaign then blasts an email out to delegates -- how they got all of the delegates private emails is another question -- trumpeting the news stories about the poll that they conducted. This way, rather than sending the poll results directly to delegates, they get the added bonus of being about to quote not from their campaign, but from an actual journalist. He sends the poll out, it comes back to him as free media, and he sends it out again.

Keller notes that Reilly and Patrick have not done any media to counter Gabrieli's TV ad blitz. I would argue that they would be fools to spend a dime on television until after the Democratic convention next Saturday. If Gabrieli does not make the ballot -- and he needs 15% of the delegates to vote for him to do so -- then it none of this will matter. The primary is not going to be lost in the last two weeks in May. It's much cheaper for Reilly and Patrick to try to keep Gabrieli off the ballot than it would be for them to put out television ads. The Globe comments briefly on that effort in today's article about yesterday's debate:

Gabrieli's campaign says it is confident that its efforts to get on the ballot will get the candidate over the threshold, but aides are devoting all their resources to it.

All of their resources? No kidding. I got four Gabrieli-related phone calls in one day last week. One robo-call, two calls from his campaign, and one survey.

As an aside, the internal Gabrieli poll was conducted by long-time Massachusetts pollster Tubby Harrison, who Keller says "has a good reputation". That may be true, but I can't help think of the words of Elias Nugator who, in February, reminded us of this nugget:

[Harrison's] imperial high noon goes bck to 1986 and the race to succeed Tip O'Neill in the fabled Eight Congressional District. late in the primary tubby pimped a poll for the Boston Globe claiming that George Bachrach had pulled ahead of Joe Kennedy amongst "those most likely to vote". So the Boston Globe had a merry few days second guessing a Kennedy whilst Joe's campaign went into crisis mode.

Two weeks later, Kennedy took Harrison, Bachrach, A scion of the Roosevelt family and the Boston Globe out into the back yard and beat them all about the face and neck with a big electoral shovel.

That is why you don't pay much attention to internal polls. The ones you hear about are not intended to measure, they're intended to convince. The ones you never hear about are the ones that the campaign is taking seriously.

Insiders Steady on Romney

My anonymous source in Washington has again sent me the newest version of the National Journal's 2008 Republican Insiders Poll. This time, they asked over 100 Republican insiders -- Congressmen and other political types -- to rank potential candidates' chances of winning their party's presidential nomination. I commented on the April '05 and December '05 editions of the insiders poll, where our now lame-duck Governor, Mitt Romney ranked fifth and third respectively. This time, held steady at third, behind Senators John McCain and George Allen, who switched places since December. Here are the top ten on the Republican side, according to those inside the Beltway, from the poll (PDF):

Rank	Candidate	% First Place Votes
1.	John McCain	61%
2.	George Allen	19%
3.	Mitt Romney	10%
4.	Rudy Giuliani	4%
5.	Bill Frist	1%
6.	Newt Gingrich	0%
7.	Condoleezza Rice	0%
8.	Mike Huckabee	1%
9.	Haley Barbour	1%
10.	George Pataki	1%

Mitt managed to get 10 first-place votes this time around (all from "political insiders" and none from "congressional insiders) where he only got four in December. Here's what some of the insiders had to say about our Governor:

"Private businessman who got Massachusetts, of all places, to do health care vouchers. The jury's still out on the religion question."

"It's an advantage to be running from outside the Beltway in an anti-Washington year."

"Mitt has everything it takes -- ideas, charisma, polish. But can someone who won over voters of the most liberal state also win over conservatives? Seems unlikely."

As far as real people go, Romney is also getting beat by Senator McCain (and 'Undecided' for that matter) according to state primary polls put out by American Research Group, (via Political Intelligence). Notably, Romney does better in Utah than he does in Massachusetts.

Fellow potential 2008 candidate John Kerry did better with the insiders this time around, going from eighth in December to sixth now. He managed to get at least one first-place vote. Here's what one insider had to say about Senator Kerry:

"Has shown remarkable resilience. Now the hard part: convincing Democrats to overcome their collective fascination with inexperienced 'fresh-face' candidates."

Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) once again towers over the rest of the Democratic field, with former governor Mark Warner and former Senator John Edwards coming in distant second and third.

Polls Coming Fast and Furious

CBS4 released a new Survey USA poll yesterday which showed Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey trailing all three Democratic candidates in the gubernatorial election. Here are the results, along with the March Results.

	May	March
Tom Reilly (D)	37%	36%
Kerry Healey (R)	31%	31%
Christy Mihos (I)	18%	22%
Undecided	14%	11%
Deval Patrick (D)	34%	30%
Kerry Healey (R)	32%	35%
Christy Mihos (I)	17%	20%
Undecided	17%	14%
Chris Gabrieli (D)	37%	NA
Kerry Healey (R)	32%	NA
Christy Mihos (I)	16%	NA
Undecided	15%	NA

CBS4's Jon Keller has a few thoughts on the poll, noting that Healey doesn't seem to be doing well with women (true), that Mihos has a stronger showing in this poll than others (also true) and that Deval Patrick's momentum seems to be slowing (debatable). Patrick is ahead in this poll where he was behind in the same poll in March. I'm not sure what Keller is looking for in terms of momentum, but a seven point swing against the sitting Lieutenant Governor is pretty good news for a candidate is still not widely known.

As far as the Mihos question goes, the difference there is explained by the difference in the polls themselves. You have to be careful when comparing two polls by different polling outfits as they are almost guaranteed to have differences in methodology that will manifest themselves when looking across the data sets. Polls like the State House News poll for example, do not screen out non-registered voters. As you drill down from the universe of all respondents to just registered voters, to just registered Democrats, the size of your population gets smaller and smaller, meaning that the confidence interval (your poll's margin of error) gets bigger and bigger. This difference can partly explain a small but significant swing in a candidate's support when compared to a poll that starts out with registered voters (as the CBS4/SurveyUSA poll does). The other point to make on this is that registered voters have taken a step to show they are at least moderately interested in politics -- they've registered themselves to vote. As such, they're more likely to be following at least the high-profile races and more likely to have heard of the low-name-recognition candidates.

This brings me to another point I wanted to make about polls. People seem to equate them with election night returns. On election night a 1% difference between the candidates is a big deal. In a poll (especially a poll in May) this is just statistical noise. In addition, the predictive power of polls this early out is not very good. Only one candidate has hit the airwaves. The poll numbers will change as the electoral environment does. If you've been following them for a while, you'll notice they exhibit kind of a punctuated equilibrium. They stay the same for a while, then some event (the St. Fleurasco, Patrick's caucus wins, Mihos entering the race, Gabrieli's ads) causes them to shift, and the candidates stay roughly at their new levels until the next event. No one thinks that the campaigns are going to rest on their laurels for the next four to six months.


(hat tip to Kerry Healey -- Out of Touch)

Trends for State House News Poll

The latest State House News poll was released this week, and the big story is that candidate Chris Gabrieli's media campaign seems to be raising his name recognition, but Attorney General Tom Reilly still remains the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.

Here are the head-to-head general election results from the State House poll for the general election, with the March results in parentheses.

	Democrat	Healey	Mihos	Don't Know
Tom Reilly	38.0% (34.4%)	29.9% (31.1%)	12.9% (17.7%)	13.0% (7.0%)
Chris Gabrieli	37.0% (21.1%)	31.2% (36.4%)	10.4% (17.7%)	15.2% (9.3%)
Deval Patrick	29.2% (25.4%)	31.1% (32.1%)	14.5% (17.9%)	17.4% (15.6%)

Looking at these results a couple of things jump out. First of all, Gabrieli has dramatically increased his head-to-head numbers, most likely the result of his ad campaign. In addition, Mihos' numbers have slipped across the board probably because he hasn't been in the news much since he launched his candidacy. Kerry Healey is now doing worse against every Democrat than what we saw in March, and though she still has the edge on Deval Patrick, it is within the margin of error, and four points smaller than it was just two months ago.

Here are the trend lines for the primary, using the State House News poll results since January.

Now, the January results aren't really comparable because Chris Gabrieli was not an option in that poll. Still, I think it's useful to see where the candidates started the year off. The trend for Attorney General Tom Reilly is pretty bad, falling 20 points in four months. Deval Patrick's trend line is relatively flat -- all his results are within the margin of error of each other. That's probably not what he wanted, but it's to be expected given how he's relied almost exclusively on earned media. That is, he's been trying to make news rather than buy ads. That's hard to do when you're not an elected official, and you only ever reach people who watch local newscasts or read the newspaper. Gabrieli on the other hand has increased dramatically, and you can chalk that up to his media buy. The number of people having no opinion of him has decreased by nearly 20 points since March.

One thing that most folks have failed to mention is that if Gabrieli can boost his name recognition with an ad blitz, so too could Independent candidate Christy Mihos. While the poll shows Mihos stagnating, it also shows his "No Opinion" numbers around 60% -- no one knows him yet, and that will change after he gets on television. There's no reason for him to get on TV in May. Gabrieli had to make his case that he deserved to be on the primary ballot, but Mihos doesn't have a primary and has until August to even collect his signatures. Also, the poll showed that Mihos pulled more Democrats than Republicans, but don't forget it's the Independents that will put Healey in the Corner Office, not the Republicans. There just aren't enough of them. Mihos gets more Independent voters that Democrats or Republicans, which is still bad news for Healey and the state GOP.

One more bit of good news for Deval Patrick in the poll is that it indicates that over 70% of respondents support Cape Wind, and he's the only gubernatorial candidate to come out in favor of it. That support cuts across all party lines, though Independents (74.6%) and Republicans (76.9%) favor it slightly more than Democrats (66.7%).

Do Massachusetts Hispanics Really Approve of Bush?

Today, John Keller wondered why President Bush has a positive approval rating among Massachusetts Hispanics, at least according to the new CBS4/Survey USA poll. He posited a couple of reasons, such as his guest-worker immigration policy or his well-advertised faith.

Personally, I'm not convinced. I think that Keller is reading way too much into a poll of 34 Massachusetts Hispanics. The 54% approve / 43% disapprove represents a difference of only four poll respondents. That sample size results in a margin of error of nearly 17% for that subgrouping. This means that if you ask this question of Hispanics twenty times, all but one of those surveys will have President Bush's approval rating somewhere between 37% and 71%. Looking at the tracking for the past year, it seems that this poll might even be an outlier. This is the highest rating the President has gotten in the past year among Massachusetts Hispanics, and the trend line is not at all smooth. Does anyone really think that anything has happened in the past month to cause a 40 point improvement for the President? That is just not plausible. I would not bother looking for reasons why President Bush had a positive approval rating among Hispanics this month and would instead ascribe it to an artifact of the small sample size until I saw more data.

SUSA Trends Bad News for Reilly

Jon Keller points to the internals for a new CBS4/SurveyUSA poll showing Deval Patrick slightly ahead in a three-way gubernatorial primary between him, Attorney General Tom Reilly, and newly minted candidate Chris Gabrieli. This is the first time that I can recall where Patrick leads in a field of three candidates. Here are the overall numbers:

Deval Patrick	36%
Tom Reilly	33%
Chris Gabrieli	19%

I did a crude analysis of the results, and just subtracted the current numbers from the March poll and the news is even worse for the Attorney General. Despite the entry of Chris Gabrieli, Deval Patrick made statistically significant gains among 18 to 34 year olds (14 point swing), blacks (10 point swing), and those earning less than $80,000 per year (8 points for <$40K, 9 for $40-$80K). Tom Reilly polled the same or worse than March in across almost every demographic or ideological group. To be fair, Reilly did make gains among hispanics, but only six hispanics were counted in the poll, so that result is mostly meaningless. The only conclusion you can draw from this poll is that Gabrieli is taking more votes from Reilly than Patrick. This confirms what I've pretty much though all along. After all, the reason that Gabrieli entered the race in the first place was because a group of people were convinced that Reilly had damaged himself so much in January and early February that they needed to find someone else they thought had a chance to win. Now that Gabrieli is officially running, those people who were nervous about Reilly seemed to have jumped ship for the time being.

The trends are bad for Reilly. He was consistently leading the three-man race last year when Secretary of the Commonwealth Bill Galvin was still in the running and Patrick was struggling in the single digits. What was a sure thing as recently as late January (before the St. Fleurasco) has now become a wide open race.

Zogby - Disclaimer Necessary

On Friday, the Herald reporter/blogger Kevin Rothstein posted the results of a Zogby Interactive/WSJ poll that showed Deval Patrick winning over Kerry Healey by a larger margin than would attorney general Tom Reilly. Rothstein asked if this was the first time such a phenomenon was noted in the polls. This is not the case, because Zogby reported similar numbers in January. In any case, these poll results were then picked up by Blue Mass Group and other blogs. You can see them yourself, along with a number of other races at the Wall Street Journal website. Here are the results for the Massachusetts gubernatorial election, for what they're worth.

Deval Patrick:	53.0%
Kerry Healey:	31.5%
Tom Reilly:	48.0%
Kerry Healey:	33.1%

In any event, every time I've put out the results of a Zogby Interactive poll, I've tried to do so with a disclaimer that the methodology behind these polls is suspect. Zogby has described the methodology in detail, but the short version is that the sample in these polls consists of people who fill out a form on Zogby's website saying that they're interested in taking polls. Zogby then randomly selects from that pool when conducting an opinion poll. In some cases for these WSJ polls, though not in Massachusetts, he supplemented this with more traditional phone calling. Zogby then crunches the raw data, weighting it by demographic factors, including gender, region, age and party. In Massachusetts weighting polls by party is particularly problematic since there are just so few registered Republicans in the state compared to all other parties. The result of all this is that these Zogby Interactive polls should not be compared with other, more traditional polling, since the methodology is so different. If, for example, Patrick polls closer to 43% in a poll released tomorrow, it's not because he lost ten points over the weekend, but it's just an artifact of the different ways those numbers are calculated.

Note that Zogby International (also run by pollster John Zogby) does more traditional phone-based polling, and polls done under that name are usually more theoretically robust.

Quantum Polling: to Observe is to Change

A new 7NEWS/Suffolk University poll was put out yesterday (via Adam Reilly) and, in some respects it's like many others that we've seen so far. Tom Reilly leads Deval Patrick by roughly 8-10 points, and with Christy Mihos in the race as an Independent candidate, both Democrats lead him and Republican Kerry Healey in the general. That said, what's different about this poll is that it reads like a big sloppy kiss to Christy Mihos. A total of eight questions ask about the respondent's opinions on Independent candidates in general and Mihos' positions in particular. Showing that the act of observing changes the phenomenon being observed, after the pollster describes a number of proposals put forth by the Mihos campaign, his poll numbers predictably jump up by ten points. In addition, Tom Reilly's numbers in that second question drop by 8 and Kerry Healey's drop by 6. One can't assume that this is because Mihos drains more votes from the Democrat naturally since respondents just heard about Mihos' campaign promises, and two questions pervious they were reminded that if a Democrat were elected Governor, Republicans claim that spending would be out of control (64% of those polled disagreed with this statement, to their credit).

If Suffolk is going to keep doing polls like this, Mihos won't need to hire his own pollster. In my opinion, this poll did as much to publicize the stands Mihos has taken as it did to measure public opinion. Did it cross a line into advocacy? No, but it did seem rigged to produce the overall outcome that the pollsters wanted -- that an Independent candidate has a shot at the corner office. Maybe I'm overreacting, but I think it's always good to be skeptical of polls that first ask who you're going to vote for, then tell you all the things candidate X is going to do, then ask "Now, who are you going to vote for?"

The poll was not all Mihos all the time, however, and it did provide some useful name recognition numbers. I like these because they break out the "never heard of" numbers from the undecideds. They show a couple of interesting things, one that Tom Reilly and Kerry Healey's favorable and unfavorable numbers are identical and also that Chris Gabrieli has roughly the same name recognition as Deval Patrick, while Christy Mihos lags slightly be