| Tonight at 7:17pm I received another automated telephone poll (from 989-773-1144, an unpublished Mount Pleasant landline) attempting to guage the gubernatorial or Secretary of State primary races - its hard to tell which the focus was on. These polls are incredibly cheap - albeit not reliable for anything other than a determination perhaps of vaguely which direction the wind is blowing or whether a mountain is some direction to your fore. Like a golfer throwing a fingerful of grass into the air - some information is gleaned but knowing the rest of the landscape takes time and better tools. It's also interesting trying to guess who is trying to measure this stuff - my guess is the introduction of Sheriff Michael Bouchard into the race caused one of his opens to check the impact, although it could be Bouchard's people themselves. Then again, two of the questions deal with the Secretary of State (which I would have used to "cold water" the result, distract the issue from any prying eyes, and improve the validity of results for the Governor questions). Details: Three questions A) What is the most important role of the Secretary of State. 1) customer service 2) enforcing campaign finance laws 3) preventing ACORN and others from election fraud. My opinion is the last part of the question is poorly designed and a bad road to travel down as a focus. While ACORN certainly should be watched and has a history of problems, it shouldn't be the focus of a campaign and even if fraud is the key issue, using the ACORN name here is likely to draw more attention to the third response than the other questions. B) Which Sec. State candidate would you vote for? All four choices were given, I didn't catch the order in my notes, but did catch the 5th choice of undecided. Emmons, McManus, Brown, and Norlander are the current candidates. C) Who would you vote for for Governor? 1) Bouchard 2) Cox 3) Hoekstra 4) Land 5) Snyder 6) undecided. That also happens to be the alphabetic order too. |
