"Tomney" Avoids Obvious in Plunging Poll Numbers

The trend in the polls is undeniable, they all point toward a major surge for Tammy Baldwin in the U.S. Senate race.  It is very clear that Tommy Thompson and his campaign are well aware of this dynamic and in the video below he openly worries about Mitt Romney dragging him down.

What a difference a month makes! Shortly after the Republican primary Tommy Thompson was riding high and he bragged to Mike Gousha in the following comment:

“I am an individual that is going to be able to be helpful to that ticket. “ [Up Front with Mike Gousha, 8/19/2012]

Tommy's performance in this area has not lived up to his own hype and now he is actually fretting over Mitt Romney being a drag on his own stalling campaign.

Perhaps Tommy should be a little more self-aware regarding his plunging numbers.  After all he is the one that ran so far to the right during the primary.  Tommy is the candidate that essentially went quiet over the last month of the campaign.  As if these self-inflicted actions were not enough now we find him nearly standing alone in support of Romney's unfortunate comment writing off nearly half of the population. Why would you complain about a Romney drag in the polls and then make yourself in his own image on a loser issue? May we call you "Tomney" for the remainder of this campaign?

Not smart. Mitt may indeed be a drag on your campaign but you seem to be ignoring the obvious and more immediate problem....your own actions.

Tommy & Hovde: DC Twins

Tommy Thompson and Eric Hovde may be running against each other but they are also starting to look a lot alike.  Both have been in Washington D.C. making gobs of money at the expense of good policy and public interests.  Tommy has made a fortune as a super lobbyist for just about every bad special interest that would pay him.  Eric Hovde has been busy as a hedge fund manager and a buyer of banks that have benefited from $188 billion in taxpayer funded bailout money.  The bottom line is that they are both big shot Washington D.C. insiders that both covet the U.S. Senate seat from Wisconsin.

Check out just some of the other ways that the two are very similar:

• Both have tried to run out the clock by delaying the filing of their financial disclosures.
• Both have refused to release their state or federal tax returns. 
• Both went from regulating certain industries to working and/or lobbying for them.
• Both favor unfair tax policies that give massive breaks to big corporations and rich guys like themselves. 
• Both favor the immoral Ryan budget that would end Medicare as we know it
• Both were quickly dumped during a vote at the Republican convention earlier this year. 

The two are so darn similar that even their numbers in a recent poll are nearly identical. The poll taken from June 19-21 shows that 26% of Republican primary voters support Thompson and 27% support Hovde.

If you want to see even more similarities between Tommy Thompson and Eric Hovde, check out this  very detailed memo that further explains the remarkable likeness between these Washington D.C. twins.  Many of the similarities have been very good for both Tommy and Hovde and for the special interests that they represent but none of those similarities represent things that are good for Wisconsin.

Will Bad Walker Polls Get The Doyle Treatment?

Public Policy Polling has released the results of a favorability poll of Scott Walker. The results are certainly less than flattering as nearly half of the respondents have an unfavorable view of Walker. The Chief, the Brawler and others have already commented on the lousy Walker numbers in this poll and how they are fairly consistent with a recent right wing WPRI poll.

Such favorability polls were almost like crack for Journal Communications when they were focused on Governor Doyle. It didn't seem to matter who put the poll out or what their agenda might be, it was almost always given top tier treatment. So only days into Walker's administration where is the frenzied reporting on these pathetic numbers for Walker? The only place in all of the Journal Communications media monopoly that I can find the results of this poll is on its "Wisconsin Voter" blog.

There is no doubt that Governor Doyle's poll numbers were terrible in his last year but rarely have I read about them in the context of the millions of dollars that were spent attacking him (even though he was not on a single ballot) and without a response. The impact of the Great Bush Recession certainly took a toll on Doyle's approval ratings but if you ran millions of dollars of unanswered attack ads against anyone for a year plus chances are likely that their numbers wouldn't be pretty. But that context didn't stop the media in general or Journal Communications in particular. So will they give the same kind of treatment to every bad poll that comes out for Scott Walker?

After the attack ads on Governor Doyle were already well under way, the research and "policy mill for the state GOP" over at WPRI published a poll showing 43% favorable and 49% unfavorable. This current PPP poll of Scott Walker shows 41% favorable and 49% unfavorable while he is only a few days into his administration. He already has such high unfavorable numbers and he has not even decimated shared revenue, BadgerCare or Education yet! Will the media characterize this current poll (and the ones to come) in the same aggressive fashion that they did for Governor Doyle? We will find out the answer soon and perhaps it will give us a glimpse of the sorry state of Wisconsin's media giants.

Afterthought: In this poll Scott Walker's approval is even lower than Ron Johnson, which apparently means that if you make little to no news, you are still more popular than Walker.

But that is exactly what they want to do!

Two items from a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll is a perfect example of something that drives me crazy. One part of the poll questioned people on how they would feel about a candidate based on several policy positions. The two policy positions that brought the highest "uncomfortable" ratings are exactly the same kinds of things that Republicans plan to do.

The issue that by far made people "very uncomfortable" (49%) was the Paul Ryan concept of "phasing out Social Security" and instead allowing workers to "invest their Social Security contributions in the stock market."

The issue that came in second (39%)on the "uncomfortable" meter was that a candidate would support the economic policies of former president George W. Bush.

The task for Democrats between now and November is to make sure that the public knows that the top two things that make them most "uncomfortable" about a candidate is exactly what most Republican candidates want to do.

ht: Think Progress

Gallup: Wisconsin Still Solidly Dem

Gallup released the results of a party affiliation poll yesterday and they have Wisconsin listed as a solidly Democratic state. Let me be clear about something before I get the inevitable "oh yeah?" comments from right wingers: I'm not saying that the results of this or any other one poll should be relied on in any real way. On the other hand, I often do find these kinds of things interesting and they can be instructive in some ways.

Gallup found that Wisconsin is still considered "solidly Democratic" along with 23 other states and DC. However, that total number is down 6 from 2008 but still far ahead of the number of solid Republican states (4). The number of "lean" and "solid" Republican states are about the same this year but the number of "lean" Democratic and "competitive" states are up.

Again, as Gallup clearly advises, just because a state is solidly one way or the other (in terms of ID), it does not mean that the majority of the actual voters will cast their ballots that way. The easiest example of that is in Massachusetts which is still considered solidly Democratic but obviously suffered a big loss. This suggests to me that a ton of Dem voters stayed home and were not motivated to vote for the Dem candidate there. I think that this just underscores the fact that you can't take anything for granted no matter where you are running.

Although the Gallup Poll finds that Wisconsin is still solidly a Democratic state in terms of party ID, it does show that Dems' advantage has gone down from 18 percentage points to 12 since 2008. Nationally, 49% of Americans still said that they were either strongly Dem or at least leaned Dem (as compared to 41% Republican). That is down from 2008, when those numbers were 52% to 40% respectively.

Gallup's poll is based on actual telephone interviews and has a margin of error ranging from 1-4% depending on the state.

Punked by Another Right Wing Org

Both the press and the public have already been punked several times by the newish right wing org, the MacIver Institute. In their early stages they pretended that Scott Jensen was not involved, but then it turned out that he was actually writing their press releases. Then MacIver launched a deceptive effort sending one of their right wing staffers around pretending to be a legitimate TV news reporter. While MacIver's attempts to punk the press and the public have been fairly direct, their older cousins at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI) have chosen to take a behind-your-back approach. Thanks to the work of our friends at One Wisconsin Now, we now know that WPRI has been punking the press and the public with their polls.

Last year WPRI and the University of Wisconsin-Madison's political science department announced a new joint polling project. When it was announced many objected pointing to the fact that WPRI is little more than a Republican cheerleader, skewing facts to fit a rigid right-wing ideology. Nonetheless, the polling project moved forward and the media soaked up and reported the results – often times without mentioning WPRI's ideological bias.

On Tuesday, One Wisconsin Now announced that they had obtained emails that showed how political calculation was front and center in a September 2009 poll conducted by UW and WPRI. The emails and other documents that OWN obtained through an open records request allow us a behind-the-scenes view of internal discussions between UW-Madison professor Ken Goldstein and WPRI President George Lightbourn (a former Republican state official). OWN reports that the emails and other records show some of the following:

• Emails from Lightbourn to Goldstein expressing concern over specific statewide poll numbers showing opposition to private school vouchers. In the emails Lightbourn expresses concern that "WPRI's own data as showing a lack of support for choice." He then appears to suggest departing from standard operating polling procedure by hiding the unfavorable data.
  
• Integrity be damned, Lightbourn gets his way and the statewide numbers opposing private school vouchers were kept from the press release and deleted from a PowerPoint presentation of the poll's findings.
  
• Later Lightbourn expresses his thanks to Goldstein saying, "It helped immensely with my correspondence with my board and other consumers of WPRI material."
  

How many media outlets reported the filtered results of this partisan poll? Will the fact that they have been punked by yet another right wing organization give them second thoughts when the next fake item comes around? While Lightbourn claims that the filtered poll results helped with his board and "consumers" of WPRI material, what has the arrangement done for UW-Madison besides compromise its integrity? Although they ignored some warnings when this joint effort was first announced, now the press and UW-Madison have a clear example ideological bias. The only question remaining is whether these various entities will allow themselves to be punked again by yet another right wing org.

Just the Numbers

Daily Kos released a Research 2000 Wisconsin Poll yesterday and right now the numbers for each potential matchup for governor look a lot like they did the last time.

• Governor Doyle 48%, Scott Walker 36%, Undecided 16%
  
• Governor Doyle 49%, Mark Neumann 35%, Undecided 16%
  

The poll also has numbers on Lt. Governor Lawton, Senator Russ Feingold, Congressman Paul Ryan and Tommy Thompson. For more visit Folkbum.