More on Burr Polling

After PPP and Civitas have pretty consistently shown Richard Burr with an approval rating in the 30s over the course of 2009, Insider Advantage joined the fray yesterday with a new poll showing his spread at 39/30.

Are they a bunch of liberals? Well the main guy there is a former Republican legislator in Georgia and aide to Newt Gingrich so I don't know that the Burr operation can play that card on this one.

It was very interesting to see yesterday that the News&Observer reported on Burr's going on the attack against us more than 24 hours after the Politico article was published and only after a commenter on their blog brought it to their attention.

That would seem to indicate the Burr campaign was pushing the 'rogue pollster' story only to the inside the Beltway media and not back home. Interesting decision and I see a couple reasons for it:

1) We have built up a lot of credibility with the North Carolina press corps after showing Elizabeth Dole's vulnerability and Barack Obama's ability to win the state before those two things were really widely viewed as possible- but we've also been very frank about Bev Perdue's lack of popularity- so the folks down here know that we've been quite accurate and they also know we're willing to deliver bad news to Democrats, making it a lot harder to push the bias angle.

2) They're getting too swept up about what people are saying about Burr in DC...insider perceptions matter to some extent but it's not like fundraising is going to dry up for an incumbent Senator because of some stories about unfavorable poll numbers in the major Washington publications. When you start worrying about that too much and let it get you off your game then you're in trouble...I know Republicans who thought the whole flap with Burr's internal/non-interal poll last week made his operation look chaotic and desperate and the fact they felt the need to go after PPP just lent more significance to our numbers.

Sometimes you have to sit back, take a deep breathe, and look at the big picture.