September Means Dubious Poll Results in Virginia 10

September brings the end of summer, the start of fall, and a new school year.  Every year in Virginia it also marks the start of campaign season.  And, at least in Virginia’s 10th district, it also heralds at least one absurdly misleading poll from some insider Democratic pollster about the race in Virginia’s 10th District.

This year’s dubious poll award falls to Expedition Strategies, who just floated a survey that puts Democrat LuAnn Bennett within striking distance of Barbara Comstock in the 10th. This was an internal poll, coming from the pollster who handled Tim Kaine and Jim Webb’s Senate races.  You can read the executive summary of the poll (no cross tabs or demos are provided) here.

The gist is that somehow without actually campaigning – whether it was through osmosis, magic or some kind of brain wave transmogrifier – LuAnn Bennett has suddenly jumped into a 45% to 41% race in the 10th District.  That, of course, wasn’t the headline that Blue Virginia ran with, citing a POLITICO Pro article that’s still behind their paywall (and I’m guessing Lowell isn’t paying the $3k+ bill for the service, so you know this was fed to him).  They chose to go with a different number – 47% to 45%, still with Comstock leading – that was arrived at after “the survey pushed undecided voters to pick a candidate.”

That’s well within the poll’s margin of error of 4.9% on a survey of 400 respondents, and the poll doesn’t break down party identification, demographics or whether these were landline or mobile phone calls.  That being said, there are a few glaring points that make it clear this poll skewed heavily to Democrats and doesn’t provide a realistic picture of how the race actually looks in the 10th.

First, it shows Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump in the 10th district by a whopping 14 points, 49% to 35%, and that number includes the three third party candidates who will be on November’s ballot.  Compare that to today’s brand new Christopher Newport University poll, which has Clinton narrowly defeating Trump 39 to 33 points in the entire Commonwealth with the third party candidates added in.  Bennett would have us believe that Clinton is outperforming Trump by a 14 point margin in the 10th District – a district that Mitt Romney won in 2012 and John McCain tied in 2008 – yet only beating Trump by 6 points across the entire Commonwealth?  It strains credulity.

Second, Bennett’s name ID is still abysmal.  After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on thousands of gross ratings points worth of TV time over August and September, Bennett’s name ID rose a whopping 25 points.  In another context, that might be a good thing, until you realize that her name ID went from 12% to 37%.  Less than half the voters know who she is.  Comstock, on the other hand, saw her name ID increase 15% in the same time period, despite having started on TV just two weeks ago, hitting 80%.

The most amusing part of this story is that this whole “wow, the race is closer than everybody thought!” routine is a standard ploy for the Democrats in the 10th.  Comstock’s opponents did the exact same thing in 2014 – claiming that the Democrat in the 10th was within striking distance of Barbara Comstock in September.  Blue Virginia, again, touted an internal poll – this time from an undisclosed vendor working for the Democrat’s House Majority PAC – that had John Foust within 2 points of Comstock.  Same month, exact same 4.9% margin of error on the poll, exact same gap between the two candidates, 2 points.

Comstock beat Foust by 16 points.  As I keep reminding Democrats who think the 10th District is winnable, this is a district that has not given a Congressional race Democrat more than 41% since 1982.  Even after three separate redistricting periods, the best anybody has done in the 10th was in 1982, when Frank Wolf was first elected to Congress.  This is not a Democratic friendly area, no matter how hard Democrats in Washington hope that it will be.

I can understand why Bennett needs some kind of news, even fake news, to make her feel better – buried inside this Washington Post article from over the weekend is some very bad news that was probably about as welcome to the Bennett camp as a Trump rally in San Francisco.  Despite focusing most of her campaign’s attention on a single worker issue – pay equity – Bennett flunked her interview with the AFL-CIO, and they declined to issue an endorsement in 10th District race.

The Post may not have realized how big a deal this was, saying simply that “[Bennett] failed to win the Virginia AFL-CIO endorsement and, with it, labor’s voter-turnout engine. It marked the first time in a decade that the union declined to endorse a Democrat running in the 10th District.”

It’s bigger than just labor’s voter-turnout engine.  This lack of an endorsement explodes Bennett’s entire narrative about being a champion for working families. When Bennett spends all her time complaining about pay equity issues, and Virginia’s largest union organization – led by a woman – declines to endorse her, how can she keep pretending she’s some kind of hero for working families in the 10th District?  This is the same AFL-CIO that endorsed anybody who ran against Frank Wolf.  It’s hard to understate how big a deal not getting that endorsement was for her.

Don’t believe this poll.  While nobody expects anybody running on the Republican ticket will have an easy time this cycle, some signs are indicating that Trump’s unfavorables are not having as large an impact on down ballot races as some people want to believe they will.  Anybody who knows Barbara Comstock knows she always runs like she’s ten points down – nobody works harder than her.

The 10th District has gotten used to Barbara Comstock’s omnipresent campaign style.  Bennett hasn’t been able to keep up. So far, there’s no real evidence that she’s doing anything other than buying TV time. Bennett is going to need to work a lot harder if she wants to unseat Barbara Comstock in November.  And you don’t need a push poll to tell you that.

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