Earlier today we released the second of our polls testing general election match ups for Governor. Last month when we did that survey, McCrory narrowly trailed Bev Perdue and led Richard Moore.
This time he still trailed Perdue by a small margin, but Moore had turned a two point deficit into a five point advantage. I wouldn't be surprised if that had something to do with poll respondents having more trust in Moore's competence than McCrory's after the first week of McCrory's campaign.
Anyway, the McCrory camp clearly wasn't happy about this. So someone named PackPat1 wrote a comment on the Under the Dome blog saying that our poll was clearly biased because we did not survey an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. Someone else, I'm guessing another McCrory supporter, chimed in to agree.
Their comments indicate a complete lack of knowledge about polling. Here was my response:
Packpat1 and Alterac evidently know virtually nothing about polling.When someone attacks us, I want to know who it is. So I googled packpat1 and quickly found out his real name is Patrick Sebastian. Here's a picture of him with his uncle Pat McCrory at one of McCrory's victory celebrations.Polls are weighted to reflect the partisan distribution of the sample that is being polled. More people in North Carolina identify themselves as Democrats than Republicans, particularly in the current political climate, so more people we poll identify themselves as Democrats. Our distribution was 47-38 in this poll. In the poll that the right leaning Civitas Institute released today, the party distribution was even more Democratic - 49-38.
By your logic that we should have polled an equal number of Democrats and Republicans to be 'fair' then when people poll a heavily Republican state like South Carolina or a heavily Democratic state like Massachusetts you would get incredibly inaccurate results. When you do a poll your sample needs to reflect the political leanings of the state's voters to the greatest extent possible.
Also, Packpat 1, a simple google search reveals that you are the nephew of one of the candidates for Governor. I think if you are going to shill for him here you should be transparent about that.
It turns out Patrick Sebastian/Packpat1 has been shilling for his uncle for quite a while. In August he had a letter to the editor in the News&Record touting his uncle's efforts on gun laws. Most of us may not have had an inkling of McCrory's gubernatorial plans until the last few months but I guess the pr efforts started a long time ago.
Folks on the blogs have had their doubts about PackPat1 for a while. On the Charlotte John Locke Foundation blog in August a commenter accused him of being the Mayor himself.
On the Dome blog last week he attacked the N&O for covering Governer-gate. He attacked Bob Orr as a 'desperate' man. Last fall he called Beverly Earle corrupt. Back in August he said 'none of the Republican candidates has a chance' and said the GOP needed to recruit a candidate with name ID. In June he told someone who accused McCrory of being a tax raiser to get their facts 'strait.' I guess the spelling issues run in the family.
Anyway, after seeing my response PackPat1 deleted his comment about our poll. Or maybe the hacker got in and deleted it, who knows. But that's why I wanted to get this information out here. It's just more sloppiness on the part of McCrory campaign to send a family member whose identity is easily traceable to attack all bad news for him on blogs- especially when their posts show them to be quite ignorant as in this case.
This garage band is sounding pretty out of tune.
No comments:
Post a Comment