Poliquin Is Conducting Internal Polling

I received a phone call last night from a friend, informing me that they had just received a rather interesting phone call.

Apparently they got a phone call yesterday evening from a Maine phone number, and when they picked up the call they were treated to an automated poll on the Maine gubernatorial race.  Essentially it was a poll asking for an opinion on various candidates (from what I was told, it was all candidates currently announced [including Abbott], except for Bill Beardsley), if the receiver had made up their mind on who to vote for, and then how firmly behind said person you are.

The voice heard on the polling sounded familiar to my friend, so he decided to do a little digging.  Were this Survey/USA or PPP or one of the other firms that has polled this race previously, it would not have been a 207 area code – so they did a reverse phone lookup, and ended up tracing it back to Bruce Poliquin’s campaign phone number.

I sniffed around a little more and talked to a number of people working on the various campaigns, including high level paid staffers across several of candidates and found that these calls were quite prevalent.  Apparently, two candidates themselves were called, and several staffers have gotten calls as well.  I have no idea why a list of calls wouldn’t have been screened to avoid calling opponents and their staff (it isn’t hard to cull them out) – but that really isn’t important.

Polling is important in any race – especially internals.  This was not a push poll, and there was nothing dirty going on here – it was simply an attempt by the Poliquin campaign to harvest some decent information on the political lay of the land to help clarify the race, and perhaps make some adjustments to compensate.

What puzzles me, however, is why polling is being done right now.  I can not imagine a scenario in which it would truly be all that helpful.  Steve Abbott has been in the race for all of 5 minutes, only one Republican has even gone on the air, and the entirety of the field is more or less “unknown” state wide.

The only people who know who these people are and have made up their minds are people who have shaken hands and met the candidates, and no matter how hard any of these people are working, that is a very small pool of people to draw an opinion from, and will not tell you anything about how the race will shape up once ads really start to get going and the public consciousness of the race raises.

In other words, I think the time for polling might be the beginning of March, not now.

The only logic I can see behind doing this now is to perhaps test the Maine electorate on their response to Les Otten’s twin TV ads, to see if the public is reacting well to them, or if they are going over like a lead balloon.

In any event – if you get any of these calls, at least now you know where they came from.