More on Colorado
We are getting an awful lot of abuse about not releasing our poll on the Angela Giron recall before the election.
As a private polling company, the vast majority of the polling we do is not released to the public. We do 1 or 2 public polls a week across the country, that we let you vote to pick on our website. We announce what states we'll be polling and take question suggestions, and we've never not released one of those polls that was intended for public consumption.
Most of the polling we do though is either for clients or our own internal purposes and doesn't get released whether it's good for Democrats, good for Republicans, or somewhere in between.
In the case of the Giron recall, this was the first legislative recall election in Colorado history. There's been a lot of voter confusion. We decided to do a poll there over the weekend and decide whether to release it publicly depending on whether the results made sense or not.
When we got the results back, we found that 33% of Democrats in the district supported the recall. It might be normal for Democrats in Kentucky or West Virginia to abandon their party in those kinds of numbers, but that doesn't happen in Colorado or in most of the rest of the country. That finding made me think that respondents may not have understood what they were being asked, so I decided to hold onto it. I would have done the same thing if we'd found 33% of Republicans saying they opposed the recall.
As a private polling company, the vast majority of the polling we do is not released to the public. We do 1 or 2 public polls a week across the country, that we let you vote to pick on our website. We announce what states we'll be polling and take question suggestions, and we've never not released one of those polls that was intended for public consumption.
Most of the polling we do though is either for clients or our own internal purposes and doesn't get released whether it's good for Democrats, good for Republicans, or somewhere in between.
In the case of the Giron recall, this was the first legislative recall election in Colorado history. There's been a lot of voter confusion. We decided to do a poll there over the weekend and decide whether to release it publicly depending on whether the results made sense or not.
When we got the results back, we found that 33% of Democrats in the district supported the recall. It might be normal for Democrats in Kentucky or West Virginia to abandon their party in those kinds of numbers, but that doesn't happen in Colorado or in most of the rest of the country. That finding made me think that respondents may not have understood what they were being asked, so I decided to hold onto it. I would have done the same thing if we'd found 33% of Republicans saying they opposed the recall.
If I'd thought we'd pulled a fast one on the world, I certainly wouldn't
have released the poll after the election. But I thought there was a
fascinating disconnect between the results of the election- Giron
getting recalled by a wide margin- and the opinions of voters in the
district about the actual gun legislation that was passed- they broadly
supported one of the provisions and were evenly divided on the other.
There's a fascinating story there in how the NRA was able to get voters
to punish a Senator for supporting a bill voters didn't actually have
that much of a problem with, and I thought that was something that
belonged out in the public sphere.
You might not like the decision we made about how to handle this poll but there was a legitimate reason for it.
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