Kevin Rothstein at the Herald reports that a new Zogby/Wall Street Journal poll shows both Deval Patrick and Tom Reilly handily beating Kerry Healey – and that Patrick’s lead is actually bigger:
Patrick vs. Healey: 53 to 31.5 percent
Reilly vs. Healey: 48 to 33 percent
+/- 3.5 percent margin of error.
Rothstein doesn’t provide a link to the poll itself, and I can’t find it, so I don’t know whether the poll also asked about the Dem primary, or whether the “Deval who?” respondents were counted. Still, it’s interesting.
UPDATE (4/3): The invaluable sco points out in the comments that this poll is of a particularly unreliable variety conducted on the internet by John Zogby. So this whole thing may well be a big “never mind.”
Please share widely!
Is this the first poll where Patrick vs. Healey > Reilly vs. Healey?
And so it doesn’t really matter, except in the buzz machine.
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The best reason, I think, to support Patrick, is not that he would be a better candidate against Healey (although that may be true, Reilly seems to be an awful campaigner in every respect except fundraising); the reason is because Patrick would make a much better governor.
And that is why I’ve supported him since last fall. But it is encouraging to see a good poll now and then.
Like everyone else, I do look at the poll numbers, but I don’t obsess about them either way. I just keep on working, making phone calls and reaching out to voters of all stripes.
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The only poll that really matters is election day.
We’re just barely starting to move into the part of the year when polls like this might tell us something about which candidate people prefer, but we’re not there yet. And when all we have is to surface numbers from a poll we don’t know the details of, it’s even less meaningful. I’m glad to see what looks like good news for Patrick, but unfortunately, I don’t think we learn anything from this. I have firmly believed that Patrick would be a stronger general election nominee than Reilly, for about a year now. I don’t base that on polls, I base that on what I know about Massachusetts, campaigns, and the candidates. Polls currently can’t measure which candidate will be stronger in the general, so polls like this don’t count as a reality check in either direction.
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(Yes, I’m discounting a poll that supports my position.)
I guess I’m the odd duck here. I’m supporting Patrick mostly because I believe he can win and Reilly can’t. Based on what Reilly has done as AG, I think he’d be a pretty good governor. (For example, as all you Barrios detractors should appreciate, appointing Gerry Leone as one of his top assistants.) In contrast, Patrick doesn’t have that kind of track record as an elected official.
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The most recent Zogby poll – showing Patrick beating Healey by a better, albeit in the margin of error, margin than Reilly – is something that should warm the hearts of us Patrick supporters, make the Reilly supporters uncomfortable, and cause that small group of Gabrieli supporters to question their efforts. But it is way too early to rely on polls. The Convention should provide a poll blip for Patrick, unless the big story becomes Gabrieli getting 15% and making the ballot. After that, or maybe even before the Convention, advertising from the Reilly and Gabrieli camps should be huge, along with their paid phone banks to ID their supporters. The question for us Patrick supporters is whether we can win this thing on the ground, in a completely different campaign. As someone who supports democracy and hates the influence of money in politics today, I’m rooting for Patrick with everything I have. It’s time to stop blogging and go back to work.
Not at all. Did you read my comment that was just before yours? I, took, think Patrick would do much better in the general election than Reilly, and I think it’s much too early to rely on polls, too. We may not agree on everything, but the things you seem to think make you “the odd duck” are an echo of what I just wrote.
Okay, see, this is what happens when I go away for a week. First this shows up in the Herald, and now people on both wings of the local blogosphere are acting like this poll is something to be taken seriously.
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It’s not.
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Zogby interactive polls are self-selected Internet based polls. The methodology is extremely suspect for any close race. Zogby does weight the responses based on demographics, but everyone who is asked a question in this poll is selected from a group of people who have already indicated to Zogby that they’re interested in taking his polls.
but I’m fairly sure that Zogby does both kinds of polls – the usual kind and his own peculiar internet polling. This is supposedly a Zogby/WSJ poll, not Zogby on his own, so I had assumed it was the former. Do you know differently?
I’m pretty sure these are Zogby Interactive polls, but I’ll double check.
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They’ve pretty consistantly been outliars when compared to other polls done on these races.
This is a Zogby Interactive poll, and particularly for Massachusetts, was not supplemented by traditional-style polling. Here’s the whole story.
I stand corrected. The Herald should too.
The Herald doesn’t need to issue a correction unless they end up using the poll irresponsibly — for example, by comparing this Zogby poll to a UMass or Suffolk poll. I’m just trying to provide some context.