Red herring from a Red Marylander

Earlier today I was one of many local and regional bloggers who received encouraging polling results from Andy Harris’s campaign. I’ll come back to this in a little bit, but first I need to talk about one reaction to this news.

Bud the Blogger is likely the one contributor to the Red Maryland website who is firmly in the Kratovil camp. (However, to his credit he doesn’t crosspost items that have to do with his opinion the First District race to the RM blog.) With receipt of this news, Bud opted instead to note that Harris’s pollster, Arthur Finkelstein, is openly gay:

Of course, I bet Harris would be horrified if his conservative base knew a little about the man to whom he paid $12,000 back on May 15th. In fact, I would love to know what Harris himself thinks about Arthur Finkelstein. After all, back in December 2004, Finkelstein acknowledged that he “married” his long time gay partner…Gee, I wonder how duped Dr. James Dotson (sic) feels now.

Clearly, Harris is not the man he portrays to voters. He talks as if he’s the poster child for modern day conservatism, but a closer look reveals something totally different. Whether it’s gay rights, or his votes for amendments to give illegals in-state tuition, Harris talks one way and votes another. And, let’s not forget, he remains Progressive Maryland’s highest rated republican state senator.

I suppose that if you can’t refute the message, you take your pot shots at the messenger. I already did a tag-team slice and dice of the last claim with another local blogger, Nick Loffer. So let’s look at the Finkelstein angle.

It’s obvious that Finkelstein is good at what he does, or at least has a reputation such that Harris has hired his firm to do polling, as have a number of Republican politicians over the last couple decades. Thus, one would be led to believe that the fact Finkelstein has “married” another man is overshadowed in the eyes of those who hire him by the effective results his company provides. In short, Harris and other Republicans who purchase the polling services Finkelstein provides may hate the sin but don’t dislike the sinner. Meanwhile, one would have to gather that Arthur has to be aware that many of those he works for wouldn’t favor the issues he advocates relating to LGBT rights but the money talks louder than his principles in these cases. At least he agrees to disagree with them on that point.

Frankly (pun not intended), I think that this issue is a non-issue because here’s evidence to me that Harris looks beyond items like race, gender, sexual preference, and the like; I don’t see this as an effort to fill some sort of “quota” of homosexuals working to get him elected. It’s likely not going to change the pro-family voting record that has allowed Harris to earn the endorsement of the Eagle Forum, a devout pro-family group.

Unfortunately, in his effort to paint Harris supporters as those who would cheer as Matthew Shepard lay dying, Bud resorts to the tactic of building that straw man argument about a pollster used by many GOP politicians from all over the big tent. Being against granting rights for particular behavior or believing that marriage is truly between one man and one woman does not make one a gay-basher, and honestly Bud I thought you were better than that; instead you’re resorting to the politics of division.

Bud closes:

The only question remains is how much longer can Harris hold onto his 40% republican primary base? Without them, he doesn’t stand a chancve (sic) in November.

With that, let’s take a gander at the poll numbers. Based on a total sample of 300 voters and with a margin of error of 5.6%, the raw numbers were like this:

• Andy Harris had 120 solid supporters (40.0%) and 13 leaners (4.3%) for a total of 133 (44.3%).
• Frank Kratovil had 77 solid supporters (25.7%) and 8 leaners (2.7%) for a total of 85 (28.3%).
• There were 82 undecided voters, or 27.3 percent. In our mythical election, Kratovil would have to convince 80.5% of them (66 of 82) to vote for him in order to win with 151 votes.  That’s a tall order.

Even if we were to assume the worst-case margin of error, subtracting 7 from the Harris column and adding 5 to Kratovil’s, that still leaves Kratovil needing 61 out of 84 voters to win, or 72.6 percent of undecideds.

As far as favorability goes:

• While the plurality (114 voters, or 38%) have no opinion either way of Andy Harris, 112 view him favorably (37.3%) while only 35 (11.7%) regard him unfavorably. That actually loses to the 39 who claim to have never heard of him (13%).
• Frank Kratovil, on the other hand, is only regarded favorably by 41 voters (13.7%) but 2 more voters (43, or 14.3%) see him unfavorably. Meanwhile, nearly half (144, or 48%) have no opinion on Frank while 72 (24%) have never heard of him.

What strikes me is that, with only 1/3 of the favorability rating that Andy Harris has, Frank Kratovil still has a higher unfavorable rating.

I’m certain that some of my readers on the left are screaming at their computer, “of course Harris is leading the poll, he’s the one who paid that gay pollster for it!!” So I asked the question regarding items like whether the sample was selected with proper proportion on items like party affiliation, geography, and race/gender and I was told that it was. Given the idea that when paying for a poll you’re demanding accuracy, I would have to believe that Finkelstein’s company has indeed done its homework.

The one item I would have loved to get but didn’t was the percentages in two areas: Republicans for Kratovil and Democrats for Harris. Obviously we’ve heard quite a bit about those renegade Republicans (mostly disgruntled supporters of the moderate Rep. Wayne Gilchrest) jumping on board the Kratovil camp, but we don’t hear about the Democrats and independents who have reliably backed the GOP candidate in recent years and how many of them support the conservative Andy Harris.

So instead I tried a different tactic and did a little digging into the Maryland Board of Elections website. What I checked were three things:

• The top-ticket (President or Governor) race results from 2000 through 2006 for the twelve 1st CD counties;
• The Congressional race results (2000-2006) of those same areas, and;
• Voter registration numbers for those twelve counties during the month of October preceding those elections (e.g. October 2000, October 2002, etc.)

What I found is that, with few exceptions, the twelve counties that currently make up the First Congressional district voted Republican in these top-drawer races. The only exceptions were Baltimore County going for Kerry in 2004 and Gore in 2000, along with Gore winning Somerset County in 2000. (Bear in mind that the First District doesn’t cover all of Baltimore County, making those results dubious at best as a predictor of this race.) There was also the anomaly of neither Baltimore County nor Harford County being part of CD-1 in the 2000 election.

However, voter registration is a far different story. With the exception of Talbot County for this entire period and Queen Anne’s County since 2002, these counties have a varying plurality of voters who are registered Democrats. While the Kratovil supporters can claim rightly that this is proof the Democrat can win in majority-GOP areas, the same holds true for the conservative Republican Harris winning in majority-Democrat ones. Overall, however, the trend is for independents and Democrats (to a somewhat lesser extent) to touch the screen next to the Republican hopeful and apparently these poll results are reflecting this trend.

After a promising start to the campaign for Frank Kratovil, he’s begun a slow decline in both fundraising prowess (aside from getting money from the usual special interest suspects) and polling numbers. Perhaps it’s because it’s as recently as last month he was still calling the portion of the Long War still going in Iraq the main issue and talking about using switchgrass to fill the gas tank instead of drilling for more domestic oil. Neither of these two positions is playing out among voters on either side of Chesapeake Bay, particularly the latter.

And when the weapon of choice in this campaign comes down to the sexual preference of a pollster, you have to believe that, even with all the help Frank Kratovil is getting from his liberal D.C. buddies Chris Van Hollen and Steny Hoyer, that sixteen point margin is somewhat comfortable. But we know that the kitchen sink isn’t out of the question when it comes to politics inside the Beltway so this is no time for Harris supporters to rest on their laurels or go wobbly. Tomorrow afternoon’s post describes one opportunity to show support.