Bennet's Numbers

Some blogger in Colorado whacks our poll today, saying there's no way 75% of voters in the state really have an opinion about Michael Bennet.

I think that's probably true, but it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with our poll. We choose to include party labels whenever we do approval or favorability ratings on pretty much any politician. That's because for a lot of voters party labels go a lot further toward their perceptions of elected officials than anything specific to the individuals themselves. So there were probably a lot of Republicans in this poll who don't know much about Bennet but disapprove of him because he's a Democrat and a lot of Democrats who don't know much about him but said they approved of his work for the same reason. If you don't include party label you probably get more than 50% with no opinion, but since voters making their decisions based solely on party labels and little else is a real fact in politics we give them when we're polling.

As for all the other nasty stuff this particular blogger says about us, the truth is we've released nine or ten public polls in Colorado over the last year and I don't remember them expressing all these concerns about us the other times so it's pretty clearly just complaining when you don't like the results rather than a true issue with PPP. Somebody in Colorado came into our site last night googling for negative information about us and I guess this was probably the culprit. Just goes with the business. Our final pre-election poll last year there showed Obama winning by ten points, pretty much right on the mark.