It's amazing to me that the Ray Meier for Congress campaign would choose to release the results of its latest poll to the public. Oh, sure, the poll contradicts the claims by Michael Arcuri that he is ahead in the polls, but the poll results aren't a great reflection on Ray Meier either.
Yes, the poll shows that Ray Meier is about ten points ahead in the poll (eleven points in Oneida County - so much for the Oneida County Democrats arguing that Michael Arcuri can win the race because he's from Oneida County, and that the rest of the district doesn't matter). But what's the margin of error of that poll? It's much larger than the margin of error from Arcuri's poll. Meier's poll has a margin of error of about 6 percentage points. That means that the poll only reliably shows a four percentage point lead for Ray Meier.
That's not much at all, especially when you consider what should be embarrassing to both candidates: The huge group of people in our district who, with just two months until Election Day, say that they're undecided. 25 percent say they can't make up their mind whether to vote for Ray Meier or Michael Arcuri. That's just six percent less than those who say they'll vote for Arcuri.
Mind that these poll results are for likely voters. They're not just ordinary citizens, but citizens who are the most likely to be paying attention to politics, and taking part in it.
These are the kind of results you get when the candidates try to coast their way to victory, saying not much of anything to appeal to anyone. Most of the substance of this campaign has come when Ray Meier and Mike Arcuri try to tear each other down with little papercut accusations about things like "Skippygate" or Ray Meier spending campaign money without reporting it quite correctly. Other than that, all we voters hear is a bunch of generic garbage like "Hi. My name is _____, and I'm running for Congress. I support people having jobs."
What does Michael Arcuri stand for? What does Ray Meier stand for? Nobody really knows. Watching these candidates campagin has been like watching a battle of between Quaker and Cream of Wheat over the oatmeal market.
The next session of the House of Representatives will be making historic decisions about the very core of what it means to be an American, but you wouldn't know it by watching Arcuri and Meier campaign. The strategy employed by both sides seems to be to bore the vast majority of voters with mind-numbingly banal babble, in the hopes that the dedicated voters of their side will be able to outnumber the fanatics of the others.
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6 comments:
This stupid stuff about Skippy whatshisname is stupid. No one broke the law. No one did anything wrong. The guy served his time.
Since when did Americans become such a bunch of judgmental jerks?
I'm not a big fan of Will Kone, but he has a letter in today's Ithaca Journal that pretty much says it all about these campaigns. (The link, for some reason, is not on their site today.) He is supporting Libertarian candidate Mike Sylvia, and he says this about Arcuri and Meier: "I have read up on both candidates and their boilerplate stands on the 'issues.' For fun I read them out loud to my wife and asked her to tell me if it was a Republican or Democrat. She hit 50 percent. There has to be another choice."
Not that I'm suggesting we all vote Libertarian, but it would be nice to have some substance on which to make a decision.
It just kills me that this is the best we can do--and that this vast wasteland of a campaign still succeeds in making us the "11th hottest race" in the nation. What does that say about the country as a whole?
Okay we have a democrat poll done by a democrat pollster and a republican poll done by a republican pollster. Tarrance is a republican pollster,period. Yawn to both partisan polls.
Here's a poll done by non partisans known as Majority Watch
http://www.constituentdynamics.com/mw/2006/pdf/racesummary.pdf
What do you think of the new Constituent Dynamics poll that has Arcuri up by 8 with a margin of error of 3.1%?
The "Skippy whathisname" thing is a fucking classic Rove operation. You think its a coincidence some random Rethug blogger was harping about him, setting teh stage for the FBI search months ahead of time?
These fuckers have been setting up Arcuri for months and you can bet your ass they know exactly what is going to happen over the next two months. It's going to turn into a shitstorm and Arcuri walked right into it.
Get it through your heads- they are fucking merciless and they're not playing around. The fuckers will do anything to get a picture of Arcuri being led away in cuffs on the evening news and we're worried about bullshit trading cards.
Well, I love the way that the poll results are reported. Great format.
I'm particularly tickled by the question mark format for saying who the Republican and Democratic candidates are. Perhaps it's done because it's just a week before our official primary - and we voters on both side didn't get a choice. But, I think the question mark approach also describes the candidates pretty well.
The polls all say that the race is close, and yet strangely out of focus. I don't think the voters really know who these candidates are - it's as if we're voting for the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, and the candidates are just incarnations of those two big groups.
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