Charlotte Polling

Jim Morrill reports on dueling polls between Anthony Foxx and John Lassiter in Charlotte.

The Cornerstone Solutions poll showing Lassiter with a 16 point lead is clearly not rooted in reality. It's not clear to me that this group has done any public polling before and they may not have mastered the concept of weighting yet: in a city where 33% of the population is black we would expect the African American share of the electorate in a municipal election to fall somewhere in the 27-33% range rather than the 14% cited in this poll.

Simply taking their data and reweighting it for an electorate that is 65% white, 30% black, and 5% other you would find Lassiter with a five point lead, well within the margin of error.

And that of course doesn't take into account the highly unlikely finding in the poll that Foxx is earning just 41% of the Democratic vote while Lassiter has already locked up 79% of the Republican vote.

I see a lot of bad polls, but I think this is the worst one I've seen in a long time.

Full disclosure, we placed robocalls for Foxx during his reelection campaign. But if a Democratic oriented group with no track record put out a shoddy poll showing him with a 16 point lead I'd say the same thing.