Sure, we’ve all heard about exit polling… But that won’t help us too much on January 27th when the Arizona Republican Party meets to elect a new State Chairman. By the time we do exit polling we’ll have the results, so where’s the point in that? This race has all the trimmings of a traditional campaign, including fancy websites, platforms, colorful lapel stickers, opposition research, and mudslinging aplenty. But what it doesn’t have, and what we political junkies miss, is polling. Who’s winning, who’s losing, who is gaining and who is losing momentum? We don’t know and it is driving us all mad!

Have no fear, West Washington is here to deliver an election first… Entrance Polling Data! Now you can know how people are going to vote BEFORE they vote… How is the data compiled? Well, we do it as follows:

1. Start with the list of endorsements provided by both campaigns. No, not the entire list of everyone who claims to be a supporter, but just the names of people who are also State Committeemen.
2. When a husband and wife are both State Committeemen and only one appears as an endorsement while the other does not, we assume that the spouse WILL vote for the same candidate.
3. Where both candidates claim the endorsement of the same person, we try to contact that person and determine who they are actually supporting.

For those of you keeping score at home, if every possible vote is in attendence, either in person or by proxy, then it will take 420 votes to win this thing! Tim Russert, get your chalkboard ready… As of Wednesday, January 17th, the vote count stands as follows:

Randy Pullen – 326 of which 2 are questionable

Lisa James – 132 of which 2 are questionable

Unclaimed – 383

Both candidates claim the support of the same 5 people, but Pullen has the signatures of 2 on support cards while a third person tells West Washington that he did not tell Lisa he was supporting her and that he is supporting Pullen. The other two were unable to be reached, so we have left their 2 votes on BOTH vote counts.

If either campaign wishes to update this scoreboard, simply update your list of public supporters on your websites and we’ll update our scoreboard as well. Where this will get interesting is when one campaign, likely the James campaign since they are currently in second place, claims that the commitments to the other campaign are not solid, and that they consider those votes up for grabs. Since these lists of commitments are based largely on written endorsements (on websites or on support cards), the trailing campaign will basically be saying that they believe a) those people’s commitments mean nothing and they can still get their vote (which is kind of like saying “I think you lack integrity, would you please vote for me?”) or b) that they know of some upcoming bombshell that is so huge that it will sway these people away from Candidate A to Candidate B. This should be fun… Stay tuned for more updates from West Washington!