So much material, so little time. This one's been in the pending basket for a couple of days, but still timely:
Just when I thought we wouldn't have Steve Walters to kick around for awhile (I'd been told he was on vacation), he surfaced to push Randy Koschnick's spin once again.
Who'd have thought it? The MacIver poll still lives. And Randy Koschnik's plan to win a Supreme Court seat is to win over all of the undecided voters -- 46 per cent, he says, making the race "a tossup."
Well, there are a couple of things to consider, starting with whether the poll, done by the right-wing MacIver Institute about the same day it opened its doors back in February, was flawed from the get-go.
As the only public poll in the whole campaign, it's been treated by the media as legitimate, making some of us old timers wistfully remember the days when there were some standards on what would be reported.
The poll released results on both spring and fall races -- matchups in the court race and the 2010 governor's race -- which makes it suspect, since those are very different groups of people. Only about one-third to one-fourth of the fall voters will vote in the spring, so if the same people were asked about both races, the numbers are pretty meaningless. Only 500 "likely voters" were interviewed, so one set of numbers, spring or fall, is most likely wrong.
No reporter asked about the sample, so we don't know. They just reported all the numbers, which included a 41-13 edge for Abrahamson. That leaves 46% who said they were undecided or didn't know either candidate.
And that is why Koschnick was optimistic last week?
Here's the thing: Even if the numbers were right, the survey was taken Feb. 25-26. What has happened since then? There have been a few debates and some news stories. And Shirley Abrahamson's campaign has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to tell voters in every part of the state who she is and why they should vote for her. Koschnick, meanwhile, has put out a few press releases and a web ad.
Does Koschnick really think, after weeks of Abrahamson television, that 46% of the voters are still undecided? Let's hope not. Let's at least hope that he knows better and is just whistling past the graveyard, so he doesn't suffer cardiac arrest when the returns come in.
Some political science professors interviewed by Walters couldn't seem to figure out why Koschnick would say what he did. They obviously took what he said at face value, never thinking that perhaps he grasped at the only straw a candidate can reach for when he's down 30+ points in a public poll.
It's almost always amusing when the media go to the poli sci guys for reaction. They prove, time and again, the adage that politics is an art, not a science, and facts and hard data are elusive.
This post has no doubt already gone on beyond most people's interest and endurance levels, but there's one last theory that asks to be debunked.
Here's some analysis by Walters, suggesting that what drives voter turnout in Dane County is whether there is a local candidate running for statewide office:
About 21% of all registered voters statewide voted in the 2008 and '07 Supreme Court elections.
The results for those two elections also don't favor Koschnick: When a candidate from Dane County is on the ballot, more of the voters from that area go the polls. Abrahamson has lived in Madison since 1960.
For example, when Madison resident Linda Clifford ran for the court in 2007, more than 10% of all votes statewide came from Dane County.
But Dane County's percentage of the statewide turnout dropped to 6% in 2008, when both candidates - Gableman, then a Burnett County circuit judge, and then-Justice Louis Butler of Milwaukee - were the choices.
Walters has it half right,which is sort of like being half-assed. The turnout does have something to do with who's on the ballot, but not in the way he thinks.
In 2007, Madison had an election for mayor and City Council seats on the ballot, so turnout was up. There were no hot local races in 2008 in Madison.
In 2009, the turnout will be driven less because local gal Shirley A. is on the ballot than the fact that a couple of other local pols, Kathleen Falk and Nancy Mistele, are battling it out for Dane County Executive in a hot, and maybe close, race. That's the bad news for Koschnick.