More WaPo Silliness

Yesterday Brian Moran's campaign released not exactly a topline number on the horse race so much as a crosstab, showing that he was leading the field among voters who had participated in a Democratic primary prior to last year's contest for President. Although we don't know how many people will turn out next week whose only prior primary voting experience was the Obama/Clinton race it's likely there will be a good number of them, meaning that what Moran released covers only a portion of the electorate. Our polling has found that the 2008 only voters are more partial to Terry McAuliffe. So what the Moran campaign did, and it's perfectly reasonable, is release numbers covering a certain segment of the electorate that is favorable to them.

What I found amusing is the way the Washington Post covered the Moran campaign's release and our poll. When I read The Fix this morning before I went to work there was a brief item on our poll and the Moran release pointing out that Creigh Deeds seems to have the momentum in the race. But when I looked at it again a couple hours ago this notice had been appended to the item:

(AN IMPORTANT NOTE: The following item makes reference to a Public Policy Polling survey that shows Creigh Deeds leading the Democratic primary. The current policy of the Washington Post -- as outlined by pollster Jon Cohen in a recent piece -- is not to report on this so-called "robo" polling due to questions about its methodology. The Fix did report this data for two reasons: 1. Through a lack of thoroughness on our part we were unaware of the Post policy 2. Conversations with several people involved in the primary and familiar with internal polling numbers confirmed that Deeds was indeed building momentum.)

So apparently at some point this morning the WaPo poll police got to Chris Cillizza. What I found amusing about this is that whoever complained to Cillizza about our poll apparently did not require him to post a similar addendum pointing out that Moran's poll only covered part of the electorate and not the entire spectrum of likely voters for next Tuesday.

I think most observers would agree that an independent poll with full demographic and crosstab information released and conducted of the entire primary electorate is more reliable than a campaign's selective release of numbers from a favorable portion of primary voters, and most of the Virginia media poll coverage this morning reflected that. But apparently ours is the one that the Post thinks its readers need to be warned against while no comment is made on how selective Moran's release is.