It is tempting by many campaigns to put out public polling claiming their guy is in the lead and touting his or her strength. For the second time in a month, Summit Consulting Group has put out a poll touting the strength of State Senator Jim Waring.
Now I like Jim and think he’s a good guy. But he needs to distance himself from Summit’s incredibly flawed polling.
For those of you who aren’t experts on polling, let me explain. In the poll just below as was the case with the poll release around a month ago, Summit isn’t releasing a true ballot question. You can tell this because the undecideds are uncommonly low. In fact, most Congressional races develop late and rare is it that a candidate builds up any type of substantial lead until voters start paying attention.
Yet, at first glance at the press release below, you would think that Jim Waring has a commanding lead in the race. However, if you read the press release, you will see that it is only among voters who have made up their mind. This is probably around 20 to 25 percent of the voters, leaving around 70-80 percent undecided. Now in fairness to Summit, they acknowledge that.
But there is another problem.
If you read further into the press release by Summit, they claim that the poll conducted was 400 interviews with a margin of error of +/- 5 percent. That’s fine, but the numbers they are citing for Waring only include those who have decided or about 20-30 percent of those interviewed or in other words about 80 to 90 interviews, not 400. The problem with that is that this isn’t a statistically significant number of interviews to mean anything. The margin of error for such a small sample is so large that it means nothing. You can see that in their results with both Crump and Gorman jumping around in the numbers. That is to be expected because the margin of error is so large.
If Summit wants to be taken seriously as a polling firm, then they would do well to release the entire poll and release the number of interviews included in the numbers they choose to highlight.
Finally, in an article in the Capitol Times from last month, Summit head Chad Willems mentioned that he was going to be working for Waring. Yet in this press release there is no such mention of any relationship. The reason this matters is that the FEC takes a very dim view of consultants and employees of a campaign doing things independently that could ostensibly be seen as beneficial to a candidate they are working for. Now Summit may not be working for the Waring campaign, but if they are, then they should disclose it to the recipients of the press release.