Post poll shows Kaine up 3%. Kilgore whines.
In today’s Washington Post, Michael Shear and Claudia Deane have a front-page story about the latest Post poll, which shows Lt. Governor Tim Kaine polling at 47%, three points above Jerry Kilgore’s 44%. (The complete results are available as a 157k PDF.) With a MoE of 3%, they can only be said to be tied. However, this is the fourth of the five most recent polls that has shown Kaine to be leading, so there’s no reason to suspect otherwise.
Naturally, the Kilgore campaign is upset about this poll. So they’ve attacked the Washington Posthaving started doing so via blog surrogates two days ago. The trouble is that there’s only one complaint made by campaign manager Ken Hutcheson that’s about he poll itself, and it’s a humdinger:
The poll was conducted on Sunday through Wednesday of this past week. A quick glance back reveals that on early Sunday afternoon when the poll began, the Washington Redskins were playing a home game televised across the entire Commonwealth, the Martinsville NASCAR race was being televised and many families were still in church. The poll concluded its interviews on Wednesday night, another big night for church attendance in rural Virginia.
Democrats, Hutcheson assumes, neither go to church nor watch football. Hutcheson is asserting that a poll that stretches over four days cannot be considered valid if some portion of the electorate is not answering their phone for a period of a few hours. He has failed to list the frequency with which Virginians urinate, the time that they spend having sex (only in the missionary position, natch), and the high-larious effects of this week’s rural breakout hit, “My Name is Earl.”
The Kilgore campaign must be some kind of upset to be polling so low, and I can appreciate the need to flail, but I can’t see why guys like Ken Hutcheson would want to go burning bridges like this. He’ll presumably live in Virginia for a long time, and continue to work in politics. Why accuse the newsroom of the Washington Post of colluding with their editorial department and a crooked polling firm? He’s a smart guy — I can’t understand why he’d want to go and make his life difficult for years down the line to score cheap political points.
15 Comments