Fox 59 News is reporting tonight on the lack of independent polls this year in Indianapolis' mayor's race. In fact, not a single independent poll has been taken to date, a sharp contrast to past mayoral races where the Indianapolis Star and area TV stations have conducted their own independent polls to track the race. Fox 59 News did get polling information from the respective campaigns which, not surprisingly, show their own candidate in the lead.
If you believe the latest poll released by the campaign of Mayor Greg Ballard, he has a comfortable double-digit lead over Democrat Melina Kennedy. The Ballard campaign says their poll shows them with a 51%-39% lead over Kennedy. The poll showed Libertarian Chris Bowen polling 2% of the vote, while 8% of the voters are undecided.
Kennedy's campaign claims to have a small, 2-point lead over Ballard with a large bloc of undecided voters. According to her poll, she leads Ballard 40%-38% with 21% of voters undecided. The Libertarian candidate was picking up just 1% of the vote in Kennedy's poll. The number of undecided voters suggested by the Kennedy poll this late in the campaign seems a bit on the high side.
Fox 59 News did not provide cross tabs for the respective polls so it is difficult to draw much from either campaign's poll numbers. Ballard's poll was conductec by Public Opinion Strategies and has a 4-percentage point margin of error. Kennedy's poll was conducted by Riggs Research and has a 2-percentage point margin of error. Ballard's campaign told Fox 59 News that Kennedy's polling firm has a history of unreliable polling. Kennedy's poll was conducted a couple of weeks ago, while Ballard's latest polling numbers were taken last week.
4 comments:
A 2% margin of error? You know how big the sample would be to hav a 2% MOE? Not even expensive national polls have 2% MOE's.
By the way, these poll results sound like the ones that candidates were talking about a month ago.
It's a mystery why all the news organizations decided against polling this race. Maybe it's a good thing if people don't know what outcome to expect. Some elections are too poll driven, discouraging people from coming out to vote because the polls will often make it look like one candidate is a sure bet to win.
I'm glad that no news organization decided to release a poll this close to the election. It would be incredibly irresponsible. I'm like you, it's a mystery why all the news organizations chose not to poll. They probably thought each other would poll and they'd simply report the result. That the Star didn't is the biggest surprise.
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