The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

The Massa campaign and local bloggers are both upset about the closing of the 8 bed acute psychiatric unit at the Canandaigua VA hospital. Since this same hospital was "saved" a couple of weeks ago, there's good reason to question why services are being cut immediately after salvation was at hand.

That said, every time I hear Vets complain about the closing of a VA hospital, I wonder why they must receive their health care through a parallel, often inferior, and usually inconvenient delivery system. What if we closed every VA hospital and simply gave Veterans an insurance card that allowed them to recieve quality care at any hospital? Why should a Vet who has a psychiatric crisis be forced to travel to Canandaigua (and now Buffalo or Syracuse) for treatment?

I believe Vets should get the best care possible, but the VA system seems like a hold-over that has outlived its usefulness.

Kuhl's spokesman, Bob VanWicklin, spins wildly on the Majority Watch poll:

It's a left-leaning group. I wouldn't call them independent. They're a group that wants to see a Democratic majority in Congress, from what I understand.

Majority Watch is a project of Constituent Dynamics and RT Strategies.  Constituent Dynamics is a recently established polling company trying to perfect IVR polls, or robo-polling.  RT is a joint project of one Democrat and one Republican.  They're the same firm that does polling for independent, well-respected political analyst Charlie Cook.  Many have called their polls wrong, nobody's called them biased.

And we don't know anything about the methodology of the poll, other than the little information they gave, so we're sort of skeptical about the questions they may have asked, or how they asked them.

A full discussion of methodology, as well as every question asked in the poll [pdf], is easily accessible on the Majority Watch site.  As for how the questions are asked, it's a robo-poll, so every question is asked the same way by a pre-recorded voice.

It doesn't at all compute with any of our internal polling [...] So we'll just sort of discount it.

Finally, after two heaping helpings of bullshit, a little bit of truthful spin.  I expect spin from a flack, but Mr. VanWicklin's bull-to-spin ratio is chronically high. 

Reader Anne writes to recommend an article about the Working Families Party's GOTV efforts.  The WFP has decided to target "blanks" or unaffiliated voters in three Northeast Congressional districts, including the 29th.  WFP internal polls show that these voters are receptive to the WFP's progressive message, which includes universal health care and opposition to free trade.

New York is one of the few states where candidates run on multiple party lines.  Eric Massa is running on the Working Families Party line as well as the Democratic line. 

I'm skeptical that unaffiliated voters, who have shown that they're not committed to the center-left Democrats, will be more receptive to the farther left message of WFP.  But GOTV is GOTV, and Massa can use anything he can get.  The downside of the WFP effort is that it is all direct mail in the 29th.  Direct mail is less effective than the canvassing and phone banks that WFP will use to support candidates in two other districts.

Bob Lonsberry has been attacking Massa's Batiste ad on air and in print.  Between the overblown rhetoric (he calls Batiste a "foot soldier for the Nancy Pelosi army"), Lonsberry makes some points that are worth considering.   Is Batiste, as Lonsberry claims, a "Democrat shill"?  And is his appearance in a Massa ad "baseless mudslinging"?

Lonsberry's whole argument starts with the assumption that Batiste "made" the ad.  That's not true. The Massa campaign clearly states that the ad was taken from a radio interview given by Batiste.  Batiste hasn't endorsed Massa, and he's not serving as a spokesman for the Massa campaign.  Massa is using Batiste's words in his ads because he criticized Massa's opponent.

Whether or not Batiste officially endorses a Democrat, much of what Batiste says is consistent with the Democratic critique of the war in Iraq. Batiste certainly agrees with Democrats when he criticizes the conduct of the war.  He thinks that Rumsfeld's war plan allowed the insurgency to grow, and that Rumsfeld should be fired.  However, the positive part of his agenda is quite different from Nancy Pelosi's (or Eric Massa's).

First, he's on the record [pdf] on the dire consequences of pulling out of Iraq:

Should we pull out of Iraq on some timeline in the future, whatever that turns out to be, without finishing the work that we started, I think the result will be a civil war of some magnitude, which will turn into a regional mess.

Second, he's not shy about asking for a long-term, big commitment in Iraq:

Do we need to revisit a draft or some type of national service?

I think we need to seriously mobilize this country for war. That may include rationing systems to help pay for the war. It may include some kind of national service.

This is going to go on for a long time: 10 years, maybe longer. I don't know. But everything is being treated as if it is business as usual, yet we're spending $1.5 billion a week. We're funding the Army with budget supplements. That means there are no offsets. In reality, we're mortgaging our future.

Neither of these positions are Massa's or Pelosi's.  If Batiste is supposed to be a shill, he needs to go back to PR school.

Let's turn to the "baseless mudslinging" charge.  Here's how Lonsberry phrases it:

Kuhl's offense is that he went to Iraq and said he was proud of our troops. He went to Iraq and came back and said the GIs said they were completing their missions. For this the John Batiste mud-throwing ad has called him a liar.

Sounds pretty bad, if that's indeed what Kuhl said.  It isn't.  Kuhl's widely-quoted words were about the overall situation in Iraq, not just the performance of the troops.  For example, he said, "I think we'll start to see significant numbers of U.S. troops coming home by the end of this year" and "it really isn't that bad".  He no longer repeats those lines, but he still referred to his discussion with General Casey in Iraq during every debate I witnessed.

Lonsberry also says that freshman Congressmen like Kuhl have little influence over the war. That's right, but it's Kuhl himself who tried to create the opposite impression by characterizing his trip as a "fact finding" mission.  Why would Kuhl have to gather facts if he's not in a position to act on those facts?

The truth is that Kuhl's went Iraq go gather anecdotes, not find facts.  Batiste called him out immediately after the trip because his posturing was so transparent, and so transparently wrong.  He did so without any prodding from the Massa campaign.  To my knowledge, Batiste has not uttered the word "Massa" in any of his interviews or writings to date.

Lonsberry raises some other important questions in his article, such as what we're to think of generals who quit and then criticize the country's leadership during time of war.  He refers to Batiste as "Little Mac", a comparison to George McClellan, the ineffective Civil War general who ran for president. 

The McClellan comparison is clever but wrong. McClellan was relieved of command.  Batiste would have been promoted if he hadn't retired.  After being relieved of command, McClellan remained in the Army and wrote a self-justifying report lauding his actions and criticizing the Lincoln administration.  Batiste's words and actions before his retirement were scrupulously loyal -- he held his tongue until he retired.  McClellan ran for President in 1864 while still a General, resigning his commission on election day.  Batiste isn't running for office, doesn't endorse candidates, and works full-time at Klein Steel.

Batiste was in a position with no good choices.  To remain in the Army and criticize the war from the inside would be disloyal and disruptive.  Quitting and criticizing the war leaves him open to charges of disloyalty and questions about why he didn't change things from the inside.  He chose the latter course, and Lonsberry gives him harsh treatment for doing so.

While I agree with Lonsberry that merely having held a high rank doesn't give Batiste special privileges in a political debate, I don't think that Lonsberry has made the case that Batiste is a political shill.  Batiste's words might have political consequences, but there's no evidence that his motivations are partisan.

As noted in this morning's earlier post, NY-20 was the major outlier in the races where other polls could be compared to Majority Watch's work.  Today's Siena Poll in that race adds more reason for skepticism.  It shows Gillibrand trailing Sweeney by 14 points.  The Majority Watch poll, taken around the same time, shows her ahead by 13, a 27-point spread.

Is Majority Watch full of crazy talk?  That seems to be the theme of some postings here and on other blogs.  While keeping in mind that old chestnut "the only poll that matters is on election day", let's look how Majority Watch polls stack up in 8 9 other contested districts with multiple recent polls.

It looks like there are three four districts where Majority Watch is in the ballpark:

• IL-06:  MW calls it Duckworth (D) by 5.  Other recent polls are tied or Duckworth by 5.
• MN-06:  This is the Wetterling race, the mother of an abducted child who gave the Democrats' radio address on the first weekend of the Foley scandal.  Polls taken early in the month show Bachmann (R) by 3.  The MW poll taken on 10/12 shows Wetterling by 5.  A newspaper poll taken 10/16 shows Wetterling by 8.
• NM-01:  In this heavily polled race, both MW polls are squarely in the middle of the other polls.
• WA-08: MW is within a couple of points of a recent SurveyUSA poll, and both show Reichert (R) with a slim lead.

Here are races that have only partisan comparison polling, but MW seems reasonable:

• CT-05:  MW has Johnson (R) by 6.  The other polls are all partisan, with the Republican poll showing the Republican by 10, and the Democratic poll showing the Democrat by 1 or by 5.
• FL-13:  The Democratic poll has Jennings (D) up by 8 last month and 12 this month.  MW has him up by 3 last week.

Here are some districts where MW may be an outlier:

• CO-07:  MW has it as a tie.  Other recent surveys have Perlmutter (D) up by 6 or 11.
• NY-20:  Gillibrand's (D) own poll has her up by 1.  MW's, taken two days later, has her up by 13.
• NY-26:  MW's Davis (D) by 16 is the widest margin so far, even though Zogby's poll taken at about the same time has Davis by 15.

Other than NY-20, I don't see a poll where Majority Watch looks way out of sync with the rest of the professional pollsters.  But, as with the first poll in this post, I recommend that all readers who are interested in polls read the excellent analysis at pollster.com, which makes it clear that polling in House races is far less accurate than Presidential race polling.

(Update:  Forgot WA-08)

The crosstabs [pdf] for the Majority Watch poll show how important the Monroe/Ontario suburbs (the "Volvo-Donut") are to the Massa effort. Majority Watch divides the district into the North (Monroe and Ontario) and the South (the rest). In the North, Massa leads Kuhl by 26 points. In the South, Massa's ahead by one percent.

According to this poll, everything's worse for for Kuhl in the North. The "voter motivation index", which measures how likely it is that voters are going to vote, is the highest in there (7.76/9.0). Voters in the North are the most certain in their choice (83%), and the least pleased (67%) with the job that Bush is doing.

Overall, the bad news keeps on coming for Kuhl. 82% of voters in the entire district are "certain" in their choice. Only 9% of the voters are undecided. The voter motivation index for Massa voters is higher than that of Kuhl voters. Democrats are more motivated to vote than Republicans.

With undecided, certainty and motivation numbers like these, it's hard to see light at the end of the tunnel for the Kuhl campaign. If this survey is right, voters in the 29th have made up their minds, they've chosen Massa, and they're going to vote that choice.

Majority Watch, an independent, non-partisan polling project, has Eric Massa leading Randy Kuhl by 12 points in a poll taken Sunday and Monday in the 29th. The poll uses IVR (touch tone response) technology and has a margin of error of 3%.

This is the first year of the Majority Watch polling project, the methodology hasn't been proven, and House races are hard to poll.  Nevertheless, this is huge news for the Massa campaign. 

Full crosstabs [pdf] are available and worth a closer look.

Like a lot of other analysts, Ken Rudin of National Public Radio has the 29th on his list of key races.  But, unlike every other analyst I've seen, he rates the 29th a toss-up.  That might be a shot in the dark, or perhaps it's an indication of things to come.

Randy Kuhl has posted a new ad featuring Amo Hougton's endorsement.  Houghton is Kuhl's widely respected predecessor in the 29th.

Eric Massa's web site features his new endorsement from the Messenger-Post Newspapers.  This chain publishes a Canandaigua daily and suburban weeklies in Monroe County.