Frank Phillips at the Globe parses some internal poll numbers from the Gabrieli campaign which show him in the lead:
According to a memo obtained by the Globe, the poll shows Gabrieli at 33 percent, Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly at 20 percent and Deval Patrick at 17 percent.
… The memo (which was sent by the Gabrieli campaign to some supporters) leaves out a few crucial facts. When the respondents were culled for likely Democratic primary voters, the poll showed that the race tightens – Gabrieli, 31, Reilly, 26, and Patrick, 21.
Strictly for entertainment purposes only, and not to be used as the basis for an actual cash wager. I guess it wouldn’t surprise me that much if these numbers were right — after all, there are probably a lot of folks who are dimly aware of Reilly and totally unaware of Patrick, but they’ve all seen Gab’s ads. When the other candidates hit the airwaves, the fur will really start to fly.
Just early polls, and internal ones at that, but still, they add to what other polls have been reflecting: people are hearing Gabrieli’s message and responding positively to it, to the point that the race has to be considered a roughly equal 3-way contest.
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Anyone not firmly in another candidate’s camp has to be really rooting for him to get on the ballot.
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And check out the nice profile of Gabrieli’s background in today’s Globe.
I was in the process of writing up a post when this one went up, so I’ll just put the gist of what I was saying in this comment:
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Considering the paper, I’d have to say yes.
indeed, though I can see why such a poll, even if commissioned by the campaign itself, would cause a stir. After all, everyone previously though it was two-person race, but this offers evidence that is a legit three-person race after all. Maybe tainted evidence, but something to catch people’s attention.
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The real key for him is whether the favorables stick after the media blitz is done. In any case, I think it shows that early media blitzes are valuable, and I think so despite the peculiar situation that Gabrieli is in re: getting on the ballot. As far as Patrick goes, many people still don’t know him, and I think his door really is closing unless he gets some ads on the air soon or otherwise gets himself in the media consistently.
Patrick and Reilly would be fools to spend as much as a dime on ads until we know whether Gabrieli is getting on the ballot. The September primary is not going to be won or lost in the last two weeks of May.
What makes you think that Gabrieli’s media blitz will be “done” anytime before the Primary?
Yesterday visiting a good friend of cares about politics but doesn’t follow it closely. She doesn’t watch TV. She does vote, much more than most people, including in both a municipal election and a state legislative special election last year (yeah, she lives in Somerville đŸ™‚
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I was watching the stream of the Lt. Governor debate, and she overheard one of them (Murray, I think), saying “I’m so glad Mitt Romney is leaving our commonwealth!” “Romney is leaving,” she asked me? I said yeah, he’s running for president.
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Later, I asked her if she thought Romney was running for re-election, and she said she didn’t know. I asked if she knew who any of the candidates for governor were, and she said no. So I ran the names by her. Deval Patrick, she’s heard the name, but didn’t know what he was running for. I know she’s heard me mention him as a candidate for governor, and that’s probably where she remembered the name from. Tom Reilly’s name also seemed familiar, but she didn’t know why or where from, it was just a name she’d heard. The other three (Mihos, Healey, and Gabrieli) did not ring a bell.
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I suppose many Blue Mass Group readers would find this surprising, but I don’t. I think she’s in the solid majority, when it comes to awareness of this race in our state right now, and we’re in the minority.
Notice, by the way, that when I asked if she knew of any of the candidates for Governor, she said no, but when I said the names, two were familiar? Now think about the typical poll: They give you a list of names. Then if you say you don’t know, they ask you again. I think there are a lot of people who would eventually give a pollster one of the names they’d heard something good about, even if they haven’t paid any attention to the race yet. If you just ask “who would you vote for Governor?” without any further elaboration and took “I don’t know” as a valid answer, I think right now I Don’t Know would be leading everyone else combined.
That is reality cos.
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My litmus test for “too far left”.
If one is surprised by Cos’s example then one is so far left that reality has abandoned them when it comes to politics.
Gabrieli is on TV. Nobody else is. He’s going to do well in polls. It’s not more complicated than that.
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When Deval Patrick and Tom Reilly get on TV, we’ll start to have a sense of how the numbers are going to shape up. Before that we know nothing, and you all need to get a life. NOTHING you’re seeing in polls at this point means a thing.
I would also point out that internal polls are perhaps not a slam dunk as a discussion topic, for a blog that is working overtime to display its independence from individual campaigns. I realize that this “internal poll” apparently made it to BMG by way of the Globe, which perhaps qualifies as “news” … but the big picture is that a campaign can do a lot to its internal polling (intentionally or not) to weaken the results. So, commenting on those results gives the campaigns an opportunity to (possibly falsely) influence the discussion at BMG.
Perhaps this is a tactic that is as old as politics, but it still seems like something we should be careful of.
(see above)
A blatantly anti-Patrick reporter and teh Gabrieli campaign releasing these internal numbers makes me take this all with a huge grain of salt. When I see similar results from a media poll, I’d believe it more, but I am not surprised if Gabrieli’s name recognition is way up.
Is Phillips “anti-Patrick”? Cite examples.
“blatantly anti-Patrick” is too strong a term, but the general tone of his articles about Patrick have been tilted against him, which is something i first saw pointed here on this site, and noticed his name more and more on articles in the globe, especially after that first debate and Tom Reilly’s Ameriquest nonsense. I’m looking through Globe articles online and having trouble finding specific examples, though I’d guess that others here have some better idea.
was the one about the Georgia bank that delayed recording a loan to Patrick. Link. Total bullshit article – it was all wink-wink innuendo with not a shred of evidence to suggest that Patrick did anything even remotely wrong. I posted about it at the time, and concluded with the following jab at Phillips:
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If I were Gabrieli, I’d have leaked a General election poll showing him beating Healey by a huge margin with the other candidates are behind or neck-and-neck. That might convince people to vote for him at the convention.
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Right now, if he seems to be a threat to both Patrick and Reilly, there’s no way he gets on the ballot. They already ‘control’ something like 3/4 of the delegates.
But doesn’t he then become more attractive to undecided ex-officios? And are there enough of them to get his 15%?
We’ll find out next weekend one way or another.
Gabrielli is just Mihos with a lot more class and a little more political intelligence.
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But really, he lacks political instincts. Has no original ideas. Just money to support other peoples ideas. Now he wants to spend a billion $$ of our money on what is basically a venture capital gamble that has money coming in from all over. State spending on stem cell is more a gesture then a significant contribution. It is the laws that we pass that alow the research to take place here.
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And mnow he has this poll.
Jeeeesh!
it’s an internal poll that was leaked to the press. how credible could it possibly be??
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Charley even makes that caveat clear in the post: