In the Right

"Please confine your answers to just one blue book, and for further reference, you may read below:"

The five paragraphs above form the content of an e-mail I sent to some pollsters and communications guys I've known and worked with over my three decades in politics, referencing this Roll Call story posted by my colleague Emily Cadei Tuesday afternoon -- about how Republican Assemblyman Greg Ball's campaign in New York's 19th District had released the results of a poll that didn't include the entire district.

The responses, all on background, varied from labeling the exercise equine fertilizer, to suggesting it was the political equivalent of a felony, to raising questions about the mixing of campaign funds raised under New York's rather liberal finance regime with those raised under stricter federal law, with just about everything in between.

Wrote one: "WOW. WOWWOWWOW ... The poll is of very limited utility, and should be analyzed as nothing more than anecdotal exercise. The pollster should take pains to tell the candidate to not read too deeply into the results, due to the obvious geographic limitations (I would imagine that partisanship and age and all other demos are pretty significantly off too). The candidate was penny-wise and pound-foolish. That said, it is a GRAVE MISTAKE [sic] - a felony, really, to publicly release the poll findings. It doesn't matter how much the candidate or someone else wants to release the poll - the pollster and any other senior person who knows better needs to put their foot down and explain WHY [sic] it's a bad idea ... Very foolish move."

Another response noted potential problems with the Federal Election Commission: "Agree, and let's consider the NY Election Law for just a moment. It's the Wild West Gone East: Corporate $, unlimited individual $, yada yada. Now, if STATE [sic] dollars are used to fund a poll for a FEDERAL [sic] campaign, how much [expletive]-and-shinola has this campaign bought viz., the FEC???"

Wrote a third: "Doesn't take a bluebook. It's [equine fertilizer] [sic]," before going on to declare that the pollster "did a disservice to his candidate by releasing it. And then doubled down by defending it ... More data is always good, but releasing it??? That was nuts."

When I queried the Ball campaign today, I got the same official campaign explanation given to Cadei: "This is a year in advance, and any poll is a snapshot, yet we wanted to see where we stood and we specifically wanted to see how close the race was on the eastern side of the Hudson, because we consider that to be the toughest area. That said, these are just the early results of our first wave of polling, we should have more in- depth analysis next week, and we are extremely encouraged."

I asked if the reference to "we should have more in-depth analysis next week" was another way of saying the Ball campaign would be fielding another survey next week, and instead was sent the full polling memo from the partial survey.

Paraphrasing White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. The question now is, what will the Ball campaign do about the crisis it has brought on itself?

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