The Senate Democrats’ campaign committee sent out a press release today that at first glance prompted this reaction:
“No way.”
It was about a poll of the 2010 Missouri Senate race that showed state Sen. Chuck Purgason, who’s running a shoestring campaign for the Republican nomination, possibly “polling in the double-digits” against Republican Rep. Roy Blunt.
Blunt, a veteran congressman with national name I.D. who will be awash in Republican money next year, was “struggling to crack 50 against a little-known Republican opponent,’ the release quoted a polling firm official as saying.
Was Purgason actually creeping up on Blunt? He has little money and few outside of his Ozarks district know who he is. A sudden climb would cool the Blunt camp’s coffee pretty quickly.
But wait.
Turns out that Purgason’s ‘double-digit’ support was actually just 15 percent against Blunt’s 50, according to Tom Jenson, a spokesman for Public Policy Polling, the Raleigh, N.C. firm which conducted the survey.
That’s a pretty healthy cushion. Thirty-five percent was undecided.
PPP is a Democratic polling firm that uses automated polls. In other words, you answer the questions by pressing a number on your phone key pad.
Jensen said PPP isn’t working for any of the candidates, but regularly takes the political temperature in states with important races.
It did so in Missouri last January, asking about a general election matchup between Blunt and Robin Carnahan, the likely Democratic nominee. Same result this time around.
Tie game in the early innings.
“It’s unusual to poll a race and poll again 10 months later and see that nothing has changed,” Jensen said. “But the Democratic brand is very weak right now. That will make this pretty competitive.”
