Over 150 college students from across the state gathered in Northampton to attend the CDM Convention this past weekend. Students were asked to participate in a poll to measure their support for each of the five candidates for governor. As these students are not only going to be the future of our party but will be some of the most dedicated campaign staffers and volunteers a candidate could hope to find I think the results of straw poll are rather interesting. From the CDM press release:
NORTHAMPTON, MA – In a straw poll conducted on the 2nd day of the College Democrats of Massachusetts annual convention at Smith College, Juliette Kayyem received a plurality of the vote. Each participant was given two votes to cast for the candidate or candidates of their choice. Students were allowed to split their votes between two candidates or allocate two votes to the same candidate.
The straw poll is non-binding and does not indicate an endorsement of any kind.
The results are as followed:
Joe Avellone- 0.0%
Don Berwick- 20.9%
Martha Coakley- 14.7%
Steve Grossman- 21.7%
Juliette Kayyem- 39.5%
Write-in:
Dan Wolf- 2.3%
Others- 0.9%
bluewatch says
Martha Coakley came in fourth, with only Joe Avellone doing worse.
Those college democrats are smart. It makes you feel good about our party’s future.
fenway49 says
I’d love to see the breakdown of the two vote system. I wonder if she had a lot of people casting both votes for her, while other people split Grossman-Berwick, or if she was a widely popular second choice.
marcus-graly says
Since that was also an option. But, who knows?
fenway49 says
More people are decided than were, say, three months ago, but there are still a lot of people out there who are a bit torn. If they’re leaning to one, but still drawn to another, I could see them splitting votes on a poll like this.
wpennington says
I was at the convention and most of the people I talked to voted two times for a candidate. Although I’m sure some people split their votes.
methuenprogressive says
Her personal loan to her campaign of $200K shows true commitment.
jconway says
Least she knows the difference between a state and federal account, and she is her only relative on her payroll.
Seriously dude you can’t bash us for bashing Coakley when that’s all you got for her opponents.
methuenprogressive says
Kayyem’s personal commitment to her candidacy is commendable, and it is nice to see her doing well. Only a rabid Coakley hater like you would see an attack opportunity in what I said. Seek professional help.
jconway says
There are other more rabid Coakley haters than me out there, I abide by the Fenway pledge and have repeatedly stated she will have my vote as our nominee (not something a significant number of BMGer Coakley critics have agreed to yet).
I do apologize if your statement wasn’t meant to be sarcastic and you truly were commending her, but you have repeatedly made negative posts on Grossman and Berwick diaries so I assumed a sarcastic post here would fit that pattern. Glad to see you are breaking it!
sabutai says
This doesn’t make sense to me. Was she pushing here, or was there a large Kayyem group there? I don’t mean to discount it, but it seems so far out of step of everything else I’ve heard. Don’t know if they’re looking for headlines to push themselves toward 15% at convention.
Tyler O'Day says
No Kayyem group present. Just College Dems from across the state. Voting was done on Sunday, the day after a forum had taken place with the 5 Democratic candidates for Governor. Perhaps everything you’ve heard so far might not end up holding water
Full Disclosure: I am currently a fellow on the Kayyem campaign
methuenprogressive says
The math says that if everyone had the same second choice, that person would ‘win’.
ryepower12 says
that college students in Massachusetts would like the fairly young, well respected and exceptionally bright Harvard college professor?
Lots of good candidates in this race and lots of them have good niches going into the convention. It should be interesting.
Tyler O'Day says
Nothing odd in my opinion
fenway49 says
Don’t you think?
Tyler O'Day says
I think a lot of this information about this race on this blog, has sadly been misinformation.
theloquaciousliberal says
Your theory is that (thanks to the misinformation spread on this blog), it’s a myth that Coakley is the frontrunner with Grossman a closing second?
Your theory is that the reality is that Kayyem is the real front runner with Grossman and Berwick fighting for second and Coakley a struggling fourth?
The pundits and the polls are failing to reflect the real story on the ground?
That all seems “not especially” likely to me.
Christopher says
My understanding is that Grossman leads in the delegate count and the other campaigns all agree that he leads.
jconway says
The candidate who has the most delegates coming out of the convention. Possibly the candidate who get’s it’s endorsement.
Until then all this horse race positioning resembles horse manure more than analysis.
theloquaciousliberal says
I have e little more faith in polling data than jconway or others do here, apparently.
All the polls show Coakley as the clear frontrunner with Grossman second and the others virtually unknown. See e.g.: http://www.wbur.org/2014/03/20/coakley-leads-governors-race
Yes, yes, it’s early, Yes, yes, this is mostly name recognition. Yes, yes, polling has its limitations in predicting final votes.
Still.
jconway says
Or likely in real life too. I am just arguing that none of our claims, “Berwick or Grossman win x number of delegates” or “Coakley leads polls or Kayyem lands College Dems” means much. The Paul’s have won how many CPAC straw polls? How’d winning the Iowa Straw Poll work out for Bachman? How’d winning Iowa for that matter work out for Santorum?
Pretty sure Joe Lieberman was winning at this time in 2004. Not discounting her many structural advantages going into this, but we are all just spinning each other until the Convention.
Berwick is my preferred candidate and I like Grossman a lot too. I’m under no allusions either of them is winning this thing at present.
Tyler O'Day says
I’m just going to reiterate what ryepower said notethat it’s not surprising at all that college students in Massachusetts would like the fairly young, well respected and exceptionally bright Harvard college professor
kate says
Blame me, at least indirectly. When I first began doing the occasional straw poll early in the summer of 2013, everyone was saying it was too early, so I decided to make it interesting and give everyone two votes. I would throw that question at gatherings of Democrats at meetings and in restaurants across the Commonwealth. The two vote system started spurring responses. I did a poll on BMG and based on a conversation that I had with another member, and Tyler’s response above, they decided to use what they termed the “BMG” method.
It is more interesting but has the potential for skewing things. Earlier this year, one of the people said, it’s time you weaned people off the two vote system. Her point was that it skewed, in this group, towards Don Berwick, people’s second choice. The folks in the room listened to her and said, no way. They wanted their two votes.
kate says
I originally used this method to get people talking and anticipating people splitting their vote or two votes for the same person. What I found was that some people wanted to use only one of their two votes to indicate that they were leaning towards a particular candidate and then leave one of their two votes uncast.
We got really skewed results when people were allowed to give their votes away to other to cast. It caused some really interesting results, but did tend to show where people had really passionate supporters!
jasongwb says
The Kayyem campaign has had a very specific pre-convention strategy up to this point and it has paid off in this instance. Ms. Kayyem has been focusing on very specific kinds of activists and voters in the early part of this race (as are most of the candidates) and college education voters under 30 are of large importance in the coalition they hope to put together after the convention is over.
David Bernstein recently broke down what the campaigns have been spending money on and the Kayyem campaign’s biggest expense had been advertising. Not TV commercials but internet advertising with the hopes of reaching young voters.
This has been the most interesting campaign to watch based on who Ms. Kayyem is trying to connect with. Take a look at her campaign page, facebook page etc and look at where she was having most of her house parties and meet and greats. She engaged in a very specific form of….and I hate to use this antiquated phrase…”minority outreach” with Indian Americans, Asian Americans, Cape Verdean etc.
There will be plenty of time I’m sure to discuss the various strategies being used by the many campaigns in this race but for now I will just say I’m surprised that folks are downgrading the fact Ms. Kayyem won this poll by saying she was just a very popular second choice. Even if that is true (and we have no evidence of that) which candidate would you want to be should the clear front runner in this race stumble? Just a thought.
jconway says
I guess it’s because the BMG community is a bit blog centric, but even those active in the caucuses were reporting a lot more results for Coakley, Grossman, and Berwick. We have heard little from Kayyem or her supporters here. And ward captains in Cambridge (her hometown!) I know were getting more frequently contacted by the other campaigns, even Avellone, than by her. But a win is a win for her, and we will see how this translates to convention and primary support.
Not sure what the frontrunner stumble quote is either, the way I look at it, we should be, at this stage, picking the candidate we think would be the best Governor and worry about their viability against Coakley (if the frontrunner is not our first choice that is) and in the general later. I respect Kayyem, but I just don’t see her bringing the experience Grossman has or the ideas and concrete policies Berwick has. Her absence here and performances so far in debates have relegated her to the second tier with Avellone in my own head, but obviously we won’t know the real shape of candidate support until the convention. It’s an interesting poll of an important constituency, but doesn’t tell us anything beyond that.
jconway says
I said I respect Kayyem and appreciate her candidacy, I just don’t see her doing as well as her supporters are. Nothing uncivil in my comments.
mimolette says
I’ve looked at the press release, but it only shows the percentage results. It would be interesting to know how many voters participated, and how many votes were cast for each candidate. That wouldn’t necessarily tell us about strength of feeling or how many voters split their votes, but it would allow us to get a sense of how many votes separate, say, Martha Coakley’s results from Steve Grossman’s. No straw poll of activists is going to be representative of a broader voter population, obviously, but a 5% margin in a pool of 600 votes still may not have quite the same meaning as a 5% margin in a pool of 6,000 (picking completely random numbers).
Christopher says
It was not scientific. It is interesting fodder for discussion, but pretty meaningless in trying to predict anything.
jconway says
I mean kudos to the College Democrats for having one and staying active during the gubernatorial contest and during an off year election. I respect this activism and will say it was definitely lacking at my alma mater when it came to local Illinois politics. So well done. Does it demonstrate that she will be the nominee? No. Is it a helpful? Certainly, and we will all have to wait and see who wins the endorsement of our full party at the convention.
Mark Adler says
Did they have two-equal-vote system or the ability to rank their votes (1st place, 2nd place). Best of all would have been preferential voting which is akin to Instant-runoff voting. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting)
kate says
Not ranked. It was inspired by my methodology which was intended to stimulate discussion, especially very early in the process. It’s a a straw poll and not intended for governance.