Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Yesterday’s Suffolk poll had some good news for lesser-known MA gubernatorial candidates

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I have been keeping track of the name recognition numbers in polls of the Massachusetts gubernatorial race, and there was a fairly significant uptick in name recognition for the lesser-known candidates in yesterday’s Suffolk poll, after months of very little change.

Details are on my Mass. Numbers blog:

http://massnumbers.blogspot.com/2014/06/latest-massachusetts-gubernatorial-poll.html

Here is the graph of the percentage of poll respondents who never heard of each candidate across all of the public polls this year:

MA Gov. name recognition graph

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Comments

  1. AM I READING THIS RIGHT— JOE AVELLONE IS DOING SLIGHTLY BETTER THAN DON BERWICK?

    • more people had heard of Avellone than Berwick. It’s just one poll. In most of the polls this year more people say they’ve heard of Avellone than Berwick by a very small margin (like 21% vs. 19%).

      I wouldn’t make much of it. worked in polling for a while – it could be as simple as “Don Berwick” being a slightly more unique-sounding name than “Joe Avellone.” People say they’re familiar with Joe Avellone because they’ve heard of people with similar-sounding names, so it rings familiar. But they couldn’t pick the candidate Joe Avellone out of a lineup in a thousand years.

      Brent’s point is that their name recognition is on the rise. Fair enough, but to me it says that, for all the “Berwick mojo” we seem to see here, 60% of Massachusetts voters haven’t heard of him yet.

    • Here are the “who would you vote for if the election were held today” numbers from the same poll:

      Joseph Avellone——————————————-1.78
      Donald Berwick ——————————————-4.00
      Martha Coakley—————————————— 44.00
      Steve Grossman —————————————–12.00
      Juliette Kayyem ——————————————2.44
      Undecided ————————————————32.44
      Refused —————————————————–3.33

      Since a primary election doesn’t even enter the consciousness of the typical “likely voter” until after the convention, much of the field has very low name recognition. That’s why Nate Silver & BWB in his prior post advocate for employing Recognition-Adjusted Polling Average, “where the polling average is divided by the name recognition, showing us the percentage of respondents that recognized the candidate, who also supported that candidate.”

      I’m no statistician, so maybe BWB would take a crack at it, but the fact that Berwick trails Kayyem & Avellone in name recognition but still beats them as candidate of choice among likely voters is actually a very good statistic for Berwick.

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