A majority of district residents said they aren’t familiar with either candidate. A total of 57 percent of responders said they don’t know or have no opinion of Reed, while 82 percent of those polled either don’t know have no opinion of Zeller.

It's hard to poll a race where over half of those polled don't know either candidate, and a race where nobody knows either candidate can be influenced by advertisements from one or the other. If Zeller had the money for a big media campaign, he'd be able to acquaint some of that 82% with his candidacy, and I'd wager that the gap would close. The same is true, to a lesser extent, for Reed.

It's also true that a big negative media story could sink Reed's or Zeller's boat.

(via Rochesterturning)

Even though the 29th is more Republican than the Northeast in general, I think this is a pretty powerful display of what I was trying to say in this post. The boilerplate rhetoric from the current Republican party only appeals to Southerners. Reed can't have a cut-and-paste campaign -- he needs to distinguish himself from the rest of the party.

As you can see, only the sad-sack 28th ranks below us in well-being. Here's another chart, this time with Census demographics. Shockingly enough, it looks like income tracks the well-being index pretty closely.

I was called for this survey last week, though I don't know what period this data is from. There's more information on what each of the well-being indexes means at Gallup's site.

Kuhl's poll contradicts last week's findings by two independent pollsters, who found that Kuhl was behind by 6-7 points.

Though this poll was commissioned for the Daily Kos, Research 2000 is an independent organization and other Daily Kos/Research 2000 polls are considered high-quality products. Kos posts full crosstabs, which show that Obama is leading McCain 48-45 in the 29th. Bush beat Kerry by 14 points in the district in 2004.

The poll has a small sample size (400), with a 5% margin of error.

(via The Albany Project)

FiveThirtyEight is a site that does extensive ranking of pollsters. They rate SurveyUSA as the most accurate polling organization in the nation, as explained here.

(via Rochesterturning)

This is a poll by an interested party and should be taken with a grain of salt. The last independent poll in the district was taken by the New York State Board of Elections in November, 2006.

The WHAM13 blog post on the poll has the detail released by the pollster. Here's the tell:

Interview selection was random within predetermined election units. These units were structured to correlate with actual voter turnout.

One of the most important characteristics of a poll is its likely voter screen, the questions that pollsters ask to judge whether the person responding will actually vote. These weasel-words dodge the question of how voters were selected. With a sample size of 300, a slight tweak of the voter screen will lead to a huge effect in the poll's outcome. That's where this ham was watered.

What's more interesting is why the NRCC would release a poll so old that the Presidential choice section doesn't even include the presumptive Democratic nominee. The answer is that campaigns release these polls when they want to goose fundraising by convincing donors that their candidate has a chance. Since Kuhl is trailing Massa in funds raised, this poll is no surprise. What's really interesting is the weakness of this effort. The NRCC is so broke that they can't even afford to pay for a fresh poll, so they release this chestnut.

Update: As Zabriskie points out in the comments, the poll was conducted by McLaughlin and Associates on January 27-28. On January 30, the Kuhl campaign paid $16,215 to McLaughlin and Associates for a "Survey". So the NRCC press release is leveraging an old Kuhl poll. And the following assertion reported in the 13WHAM post is laughable:

“As far as the NRCC, Randy is a completely separate entity from the NRCC and really has no idea what they will or won’t do,” said Meghan Tisinger of Kuhl’s office.

Turning to the actual polls, Rochesterturning has been posting graphical interpretations of election results. Today's post shows that a significantly smaller percentage of voters voted for Kuhl in 2006 than in 2004 in almost every county. This is especially interesting because the Conservative party fielded a candidate in 2004, as did the Independence party. Both of those candidates should have taken some votes from Kuhl in '04 that he regained in '06. In this analysis, and the other county-by-county post, keep in mind that the graphs are unweighted. So, for example, when you see that Kuhl lost roughly 15% of his vote in Yates county, remember that Yates had just under 7,000 votes cast in 2006. The 29th had about 200,000 voters in '06.

Rochesterturning also looked at correlations between census data and voting patterns. They found a positive relationship between income, education and a tendency to vote for Eric Massa. There are two ways to interpret this data. A partisan spin for Democrats is that smart people voted for Massa. Republicans could argue that the Democrats are turning into the party of the elites, rather than the party of the "average working man". I don't buy that. I agree with RT that those numbers show that more educated people are more likely to inform themselves about the candidates in an election, and therefore are more likely to vote for a less-well-known challenger like Massa. Also, the income split mirrors the North/South split in the 29th, with Monroe being the most wealthy county. By registration, that county is also the most Democratic of the bunch.

Looking through the races at pollster.com's House page, it looks like NY-20 is still one of the area races where Majority Watch and other pollsters disagree.  In that more heavily polled race, Majority Watch leans farther toward the Democrat, Kirsten Gillibrand, than even her own polls.  Yet there are a number of other races were Majority Watch is consistent with other non-partisan polls.  So this one could be dead on, or out to lunch.  We'll find out a week from tomorrow.

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. 

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)

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.

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.

Some of what he says about NY-25 is applicable to the poll released this weekend by the Massa campaign. Massa's name recognition is relatively low, so many voters might just be for him as a "generic" Democrat. But, unlike the 25th, Kuhl's negatives are pretty high: 38% negative on him as a person, 47% negative on his job performance. That means that generic voter dissatisfaction might be transmitted as a specific vote against Kuhl.

Rothenberg's advice to incumbents in these races is to "pound away" at challengers, making them the issue.