RALEIGH – I thought a remark in a Saturday piece from the News & Observer sounded familiar. Turns out I was right, then annoyed.
The N&O has teamed up with WRAL-TV in Raleigh and WUNC-FM in Chapel Hill on its latest statewide poll on 2004 elections and issues. The newspaper has used the same out-of-state polling firm, Research 2000, for several such surveys. In the first installment released Friday evening, the consortium reported that Richard Vinroot had increased his lead in the Republican nomination race for governor to 33 percent, with Bill Cobey up to 23 percent for second place and Patrick Ballantine a disappointing third at 15 percent (more on these intriguing findings later). But nearly as much attention was given to the finding that 44 percent of respondents said they would vote to re-elect Gov. Mike Easley:
Del Ali, president of Research 2000, the polling firm that did the survey, said that to win, Easley would need only one-fifth of the voters who say they would consider voting for someone else. “It’s Easley’s race to lose,” Ali said.
That last phrase stuck in my mind. Wasn’t this exactly what the same pollster had told the same newspaper several months ago? In fact, hadn’t I written a previous “Daily Journal” column about this rather silly assertion?
Checking online archives, the answer was “yes” to both questions. Here’s what the N&O reported on Sept. 16, 2003:
In the governor’s race, 42 percent of those surveyed said they would vote to re-elect Easley. Twenty-seven percent said they would consider voting for another candidate, and 31 percent said they wanted to replace the governor. “It’s his race to lose,” said [Del] Ali, adding that all Easley has to do to win is persuade 8 or 9 percent of the undecided voters to support him.
Later that same day, I wrote a column that in part (you have to scroll past some other stuff) took Ali and the newspaper to task not only for jumping to conclusions about the race but also about having used exactly the same phrase in yet another story, way back in May 2003. It makes you want to guffaw. Is this Del Ali character a real person? Perhaps he’s just a message on an answering machine somewhere that says, “Sorry we can’t come to the phone, but it’s Mike Easley’s race to lose.”
But on second thought, this situation isn’t funny. These are reputable news organizations, so surely they can find someone with a creative thought who isn’t engaged in Democratic spin. The fact is, as I pointed out previously, a re-elect number in the low 40s doesn’t suggest a candidate in the catbird seat. Of course, it doesn’t signify a dead duck, either. It’s a fairly normal finding for an incumbent about to face a competitive race.
For example, President George W. Bush’s re-elect number also remains in the low 40s, indistinguishable from Easley’s statistically. If you think Bush is vulnerable, then you probably ought to think Easley is vulnerable. Given that the Research 2000 doesn’t ask approval/disapproval and favorable/unfavorable questions the same way other pollsters do, it’s not even possible to evaluate what the N&O’s reporting of a 56 percent approval for Easley means compared to Bush’s or those of other governors, though the number does appear to be an uptick from the high-40s to low-50s that we’ve seen for Easley’s job approval in the past. And on the economy, the issue poll respondents said was most important, Easley got a 42 percent approval rating. Danged if Bush isn’t getting almost exactly the same rating (42 percent in May, 43 percent in June in this Pew Research Center poll, for example, and 41 percent in the latest Gallup poll).
Now, it’s fair to say that the national polls have fewer people undecided than the North Carolina polls do. That reflects the fact that voters have been engaged with the national race since at least January, when the Democratic primaries began, and indeed many have been engaged for a long time before that.
I would argue that this fact only underlines my general proposition here, however: it’s simply too early to draw any confident conclusions about the November general election in North Carolina. As far as certain polling partnerships are concerned, I will make this prediction: it’s their credibility to lose.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.