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Drum roll please the first statewide poll conducted after the Wisconsin primary election finds a dead heat
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Drum roll please the first statewide poll conducted after the Wisconsin primary election finds a dead heat among registered voters and the race for governor same holds true
For governor same holds true for the partisan balance of the legislature market law school poll director Charles Franklin is here with details and insights and thanks for being here, Charles. Good to be here. So let's get right to it. Democratic candidate David Crowley ties Republican Tom Tiffany among registered voters at 44% each with 12% undecided but among likely voters Crowley comes in at 49% to Tiffany's 44% with 7% undecided.
What is this gap between the registered and the likely voters?
It comes down to two things. One is Democrats are a little bit more likely to say they're sure they're going to vote in November so they get a little bump there. But Democrats are also more loyal to their party's candidate among likely voters than they are among registered voters.
So you put those two things together and that accounts for why it's five point still a close race but a five point lead with likely is while it's tied with registered.
Where do independent voters fall in their choice?
First of all pretty undecided so there's quite a bit of undecided independence. They lean towards Crowley more than to Tiffany but with a between a 30% and a 55% undecided rate there are a lot of undecided
independents out there. Why do you suppose there are a lot of undecided independents?
Familiarity with the candidates is the number one answer. A little over a third of all registered voters say they don't know enough about David Crowley to say whether they have a favorable or an unfavorable view.
With an opinion are slightly more favorable than unfavorable but less than half as many say they don't know enough about Tiffany to have a view though there they're slightly more unfavorable than favorable.
So just as with the likely voters you see a slight edge towards Crowley among favorability but a lot of room for voters to learn more about Crowley and the campaigns to compete for whether they learn good things or bad things.
Now you also found the Democrats hold an advantage in the number saying as you said they are likely to vote but more Republicans say they're very enthusiastic to vote.
Is that a hangover from the primary race?
It looks like it is if you look at Francesca Hong supporters they are several points less enthusiastic than are either Crowley's supporters or Mandela Barnes's supporters.
So we were in the field starting the day after the primary I think it's kind of natural that if you supported Francesca Hong you might be a little less enthusiastic after she so narrowly lost the primary.
But when we look at how are those people voting 98% of the Hong voters are saying they're voting for Crowley, 99% of the Crowley voters are voting for Crowley.
So I think we are getting amazing levels of party unity within the Democrats but a little bit of an enthusiasm gap mostly coming from disappointed Hong supporters.
Now the makeup of the legislature the partisan makeup really hues to the same kinds of results that you found in the governor's race.
Very much so it's a tie with registered voters it's a slight Democratic edge they're a smaller one with likely voters.
This is a statewide look at if the election were held today would you vote for the Republican or Democrat for legislature.
You really need to dial down into the four or five competitive Senate seats the six or seven or eight assembly seats with a statewide sample we can't say anything about those individual races.
Except we could probably predict that it will all be close.
Which sure looks like it's close boy that's a headline for Wisconsin politics.
So I also wanted to get your take on fake polling conducted by an outfit called median strategies.
Now they released a poll in the Wisconsin primary in California and Nevada as you know.
What was your reaction when it was determined that poll was entirely fabricated supposedly as a social experiment.
It's pure and simple fraud even to call them an organization or a polling company or something is part of the fraud because it's simply not an organization.
News has now found that it's one 21 year old guy with an Internet account who decided to make this up.
He says it was an experiment to see how that news circulated.
In fact virtually none of the most respected polling aggregators like real clear politics or Nate Silver or some of the others.
None of them included his numbers in their polling averages.
A few picked up on it in California especially on the mayor's race there and that's what brought this to light.
And credit to the Los Angeles Times who then looked into it and exposed this fraud.
But it is a disservice to the public and you know 21 year olds do interesting things sometimes but it's a challenge in a time when it's so hard to know what's fact and what's not fact.
That it's just another example that you know who knew their fake things on the Internet.
Because I don't think I have to tell you this but pollsters already take some heat for the delicate work that they do.
What do things like this median strategies bluff do to the credibility of all polls?
I have heard that there might be some criticism of pollsters from time to time.
It just doesn't help. It's conflating polling that sometimes makes errors.
Let's not pretend that polling never is wrong.
But is making an honest attempt at doing that and informing the public about where public opinion is.
Conflating that with numbers that are just literally made up out of whole cloth.
And it's a challenge for the news media to distinguish what's a legitimate poll and what's not one.
There's another one that got some play here in Wisconsin in which the company admitted that they changed their numbers after getting a contribution from one of the candidates in the race.
So this is a challenge to the polling profession but it's a challenge to the news media and all of us that try to interpret what's going on in polling for the public.
I just don't think there's a magic wand to make that kind of fraud go away when anybody with a Twitter account can publish anything they want to claim they found in a poll.
Alright, we leave it there Charles Franklin. Thanks very much for your poll.
Thank you.
Franklin's Marquette survey also shows that 78% of those polled think the costs of data centers outweigh the benefits.
Across Wisconsin communities are in battle over the growth of them.
The size of data centers, the jobs, their impact on energy and the economy.
It's all part of the debate.
Tonight, here in our reporter Merv Seymour takes a deep look at the importance of data centers to voters and their potential impact on upcoming election strategies.
Thank you.