Oh, well. Paul Burka, who had heard about the same poll that I had, now says it didn’t happen. Well, mostly.
Earlier in the day I mentioned the rumor that the Bell campaign had a poll showing their candidate just five points behind Perry (32%-27%). Not so, says Jason Stanford with the Bell campaign. He did state his belief that Perry’s ceiling has dropped to 35% of the vote.
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There’s no love lost between Hutchison and Perry, as everyone knows, but I can’t imagine that Hutchison would implant that dagger between Perry’s shoulder blades (as much as she might like to), or that Bryan Eppstein, who does almost all of his political work for Republicans, would release a poll that hurts Perry and possibly the entire GOP ticket.
Burka had heard the poll in question was a Bell poll, whereas I had heard it was a Hutchison poll. (Why would Hutchison also poll in the Governor’s race? As a sanity check. Quite a few of the State Rep and Congressional polls of which I’m aware have done similar things.) The fact that Bryan Eppstein would be reluctant to release such a poll doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but I’ve since heard from another person, whom I trust, who says that he didn’t conduct any such poll. So, that’s all there is to it. I ran with a rumor and it bit me. My apologies for the confusion. I will update the earlier post to reflect this.
Of course, the reason why I was willing to believe this is that this mythical poll was in fairly close agreement with polls that we do know about, one from SurveyUSA and now another from Rasmussen. SUSA has Bell at 26, and Rasmussen has him at 25, in each case in second. They have Perry higher, at 36, but a third result pegging him at 32 would not have been ridiculous. It was believable and I believed it, but it didn’t exist. Sucks to be me, but there you have it.
Why KBH might conduct a governor’s poll:
So it doesn’t look like its definatly a poll on behalf of one of the senatorial candidates. Lots of polls for certain races also thow in the governor’s race. I know when the internal poll was done on the Henley campaign, questions were also asked about the governor’s race. This could be the same thing; KBH might have asked governor questions along with senate questions, and found a surprise at the end?
Of course, the reason why I was willing to believe this is that this mythical poll
Well, that and the substance of it had to be very exciting for Bell supporters. 🙂
One day, perhaps you, Burka, Houstonist, or others who spread this rumor will share how they got wind of it, or even better, compare notes and track down just who started it. That would be really interesting to know once the race is over.
Yes, of course, this was a good result, and that made me want to believe it. But again, the reason I did believe it was because it was a reasonable and believable good result. Had it been Bell 32, Perry 27, or Bell 37, Perry 32, I’d have been a hell of a lot less inclined to run with it without seeing it reported in the mainstream media. This report jibed with everything else, it was just a little bit better.
Why in the world would KBH be spending money on polling in the first place? She could shoot Lady Bird Johnson on the 50 yeard line during halftime of a Cowboys game and still win by a comfortable margin.
I think I do know how the rumor got started and I’m fairly sure that most what was reported wasn’t untrue. There’s a key mistake that someone made down the line, in the blog echo chamber or elsewhere.
It’s kind of like in All The Presidents Men, when Woodward & Bernstein are sure they’re right about Hugh Sloan testifying against Haldeman. But they misunderstood, Sloan would have testified against Haldeman but no one asked him the question.
Okay, perhaps that’s elevating this to a much grander scale. We’ll all share stories after the election.