Either independent congressional candidate Abel Collins is doing better than previous polls predicted, or how well he is doing is in the eye – or methodology – of the pollster asking the question.
The Collins campaign would have you believe the former.
It released an email-based poll conducted by CCRI political science professor Eric Siegel showing Collins garnering 16.1 percent support among respondents. That’s compared with 9.2 percent in a recent WPRI poll, and 4.7 percent in a more recent Brown poll.
The email poll showed incumbent Democrat Jim Langevin with 47.6 percent, compared to 52.6 in the WPRI poll and 49.4 percent in the Brown poll. Mike Riley, the Republican, got just 22.3 percent support in the Collins poll, compared with a similarly paltry 29.1 percent in the WPRI poll and 31.5 percent in the Brown poll.
Siegel, a former Green Party committee chair whose business Aqua Opinion and Policy Research was hired to conduct the poll though he is also serving as a volunteer with the Collins campaign, said email polls better reflect the electorate than do polls that utilize landlines, like the WPRO and Brown polls.
The logic goes that those who still utilize landlines tend to skew conservative – so even if the landline-using respondent is a registered Democrat, for example, he or she may tend to be a more conservative Democrat than, say, a registered Democrat who has ditched the landline for a cell phone or Skype. However, the same logic only politically reversed should also hold true … would those who would respond to an email poll tend to skew left? My guess is yes.
In other words, in either circumstance you might get the same amount of registered Democrats (or Republicans, for that matter) responding, but they might tend to be from different ends of the spectrum of registered Democrats or Republicans or unaffiliated voters.
There’s another difference in the Collins poll. Siegel weights his responses to match the demographics of the district, whereas the other two polls call the requisite number of households until they reach a demographic sample that matches the district.
I suspect it is true that polls done only to land-lines will skew the result toward older voters who may be more conservative. In Rhode Island politics, older voters tend to love Democratic incumbents. Because of Mike Riley’s whacked-out schemes for Social Security and Medicare that are even crazier than Romney-Ryan, they may be even more motivated to vote Democratic than usual.
An e-mail poll is just as likely to skew the results toward younger voters.
Younger voters may not be as liberal as we’d all like to think, especially when you look at who comprises Ron Paul’s base.
But one major problem in the Collins’ poll numbers is this: we DO know that younger voters are less likely to vote than older voters. If you look at the stats for people who voted in the last two General elections, voter turn-out among young voters was far less than for older voters. So while they may be more likely to respond to an e-poll, that’s not the same as actually turning out to vote.
Will,
It really surprises me that you have apparently chosen to support Congressman Langevin over Abel Collins in this race. Congressman Langevin is NOT a progressive, and I daresay, not even a Democrat.
Your seeming wholesale purchase of the ‘spoiler’ argument boggles the mind.
After all the work you have done, nationwide, to support the principles and policies that you and Abel have defended, you should be jumping at the chance to back a candidate that speaks to your issues.
Instead, you pick apart a poll. Were you planning on picking apart the WPRI/FOX or Brown U. polls anytime? They’ve been out for weeks, but you’ve not chimed in yet.
The ultimate goal of any political party should be the dissolution of said party.
Identify injustices, right injustices, goodnight.
Instead, we are locked into a two-party system that places the propagation of the party over the propagation of the “general welfare” of the people. That’s right, the term welfare is one of the first twenty words in our Constitution.
But let’s be totally fair to Mike Riley. He has money, but is a joke of a a candidate with no punchline.
Why the R’s put anything behind him – including sending Mary Matalin to stump for him – is incomprehensible to me. It seems they’ve forgotten how to politick in Rhode Island.
I have no doubt that Abel Collins will best him easily -and quite possibly the neo-conservative Democrat Congressman Jim Langevin – in this race. Langevin’s stance on cybersecurity should be enough to give you pause, as an independent blogger.
Stop the wholesale purchase of the party line; Back a real candidate for change in this race.
Vote Abel Collins in CD 2!
Just for the record, I am Abel Collins’ Campaign Manager.
www.electabel2012.com/blog
youtu.be/dRhERIwWxSU
The links above are to thw press conference and the campaign blog post on the poll.
Bob-smearing Eric Siegel with innuendo that he was biased is unfair and wrong. Eric is a professional who worked for the Harris Poll, and he knows how to do these polls. He told you in a phone interview that he maintained professional standards and distanced himself from the campaign during the process. I was there and he did.
In your flurry of sensationalization you miss the simple truths.
First, a major factor determining how accurate a poll is, is the sample size- Siegel’s poll has twice the sample thus the margin of error is the only one that can attempt to claim to be scientific. This Poll is +/- 4.2, the WPRI is 6.2 and Brown is 6.3.
Second, that all the polls show a high number of undecided’s in a race with a 6-term incumbent and a challenger that spent the 3/4 million to get his message out, suggests the voters don’t like the choices.
Poll pundits can go on all day long on the virtues of online polls and telephone polls- both are valid that’s why Harris, one the most respected names in polling use both and average them.
No one so far has examined this poll by the merits. Isn’t it amazing that Collins is polling at any of these numbers considering his censorship by the television news where they do not even report that he is running regularly, the papers don’t ask his campaign about the polls and this progressive blog only reports on him framed in snide innuendo?
In contrast, Charlestown Progressive Will Colette brings up some interesting reasoned points. That Abel may have trouble reaching seniors underscores the importance of the censorship of Abel from the debates more egregious.
However,cell phones increasingly have replaced land lines for busy working families- for example, the VP of sales at WJAR only has a cell phone. Also, Obama reportedly won election because of his social media prowess and the youth vote- so Abel’s advantage here may show up at the voting polls- the only polls that count.
You are quite right that Riley’s extreme views and attitudes will have little appeal in the end, and voters will either have to resign themselves to the lesser of two evils or give Collins- the bright, thoughtful newcomer with a history of putting his forward thinking ideals into action- a chance to try a new approach.
Everyone who loves democracy should want Abel to get a full hearing. The race is really between Langevin, the old guard pork barrel conservative democrat that votes as a rubber stamp for Democratic Party leadership and Abel Collins, the new breed of post partisan pragmatists, this one acting independent of the moribund 2 Party system. Could that be the missing “Change we can believe in?”
Two points about criticisms of the Aqua Research/Abel Collins poll:
First, the results we reported were for _likely_ voters. We based our weighting scheme on _registered_ voters overall, but the voter choice and name recognition questions (among others) were asked specifically of those who said they were likely to vote in the November election (4-5 on a 5 point scale, where 1 is “Not at all likely” and 5 is “Extremely likely”). So the fact that younger people are less likely to vote should be taken care of by that filter (although I suppose it’s possible that younger people are also more likely to misreport their likelihood to vote, but I haven’t seen any research to suggest that).
Second, in our raw data, we got more than twice as many respondents aged 65+ than the Census figures for the district, and less than half of the 18-29-year-olds. We ended up down-weighting the older respondents and up-weighting the younger voters, each by a factor of roughly 2. So if anything our poll ended up being skewed toward OLDER voters rather than younger ones.
Eric Siegel, Aqua Opinion and Policy Research Group