Magellan Strategies, the firm behind the “poll” claiming Bob Ehrlich leads Gov. O’Malley, is not a legitimate pollster. In fact, they're not pollsters at all.
Instead, they're a Republican consulting firm on the payroll of the Republican National Committee and Americans for Prosperity that publishes polls tailor made to boost Republican candidates. Their tagline is,“Magellan Strategies Helping Republicans Win Elections.”
In this case, they're supporting a campaign theme that Team Ehrlich has been pushing for a few weeks--overstating Ehrlich's numbers to bolster fundraising, scare the opposition, and distract attention from Mr. Ehrlich’s running mate...
whose legal troubles and poor performance even in interviews with talk radio hosts who shill for Ehrlich’s campaign is becoming a liability.
Unless you went to Jupiter for the Fourth of July, you probably saw a report about a new poll showing Bob Ehrlich up three points in a matchup with Gov. O’Malley. Everyone expects a close race, but if you think you’re being had, you’re right.
Two Republican boosting newspapers, the Washington Examiner and Washington Times, broke this poll story on Friday. Both reported the poll was conducted by Magellan Strategies, but only one called Magellan a “polling firm.” Maybe that’s because Magellan Strategies is not a polling firm, at least not in the sense that people watching WBAL TV and Fox 45 news must have thought when both stations carried the story last weekend.
Instead, Magellan is a Republican consulting firm whose tagline is “Magellan Strategies Helping Republicans Win Elections.”
Good for them, but when newspapers report the results of Magellan polls, they should make clear the firm is not an unbiased news pollster, but rather a Republican consulting firm. Even better, the reporter covering the story should find out who might have paid for the poll. If Magellan won’t say, a curious reporter might ask the Ehrlich campaign, the Maryland Republican party, the Republican Governor’s Association, or Americans for Prosperity if they’ve been paying Magellan for any work lately. Magellan’s website lists Americans for Prosperity and the Republican National Committee as clients.
No matter who paid for the poll, as one might expect from a Republican consulting firm, the results seem tailor made to boost Bob Ehrlich’s campaign right now.
The trick to polling is choosing a representative sample of likely voters. The way Magellan screened voters for this poll, they wound up with a sample more disapproving of both Gov. O’Malley and President Obama than recent polls from the right leaning Rasmussen Reports and the neutral ABC/Washington Post have shown. A pool of voters with a higher than average distaste for O’Malley and Obama naturally chooses Ehrlich over O’Malley, so the Magellan poll was tailor made to get the results it sought.
My Republican friends might say some voters got really mad at Gov. O’Malley for saying Mr. Ehrlich is an unregistered lobbyist and that’s why Magellan’s sample was less approving of O’Malley than a poll taken two weeks earlier, but how do they explain 56 percent of Rasmussen respondents approving of President Obama’s job performance on June 10th yet only 48 percent of Magellan respondents approving of Obama’s performance only 19 days later? Too bad we can’t compare Magellan’s choice with Rasmussen or ABC/Washington Post because only Magellan provided demographics.
The work of Bob Ehrich’s “Theme Team”
How Magellan Strategies got their results doesn’t really matter because the poll’s purpose wasn’t to measure public opinion so much as it was to push public opinion. Mr. Ehrlich’s “theme team” tipped their hand two weeks ago when Blair Lee, the Gazette columnist with a history of making stuff up to trash Gov. O’Malley while helping Mr. Ehrlich, wrote, “[t]he three latest polls show Ehrlich drawing even, and an unpublished Democratic poll shows Ehrlich ahead.” But none of that is true. Only one poll showed the candidates tied, not three as Mr. Lee wrote, and that one poll was a GOP-leaning Rasmussen poll. A nonpartisan ABC/Washington Post poll showed Gov. O’Malley beating Mr. Ehrlich by eight points, but tied among likely voters.
Ehrlich spokesman Henry Fawell one-upped Blair Lee a few days later when he repeated a tweet from Washington NewsChannel 8’s Bruce DePuyt reporting “two well placed Democrats confirm: recent poll shows [Mr. Ehrlich] with slight lead over Martin O’Malley.” Who wants to bet the poll those two “well placed Democrats” saw was an advance copy of the Magellan Strategies poll, which was conducted by robo-call two days before Mr. Fawell’s tweet.
So Bob Ehrlich’s “Theme Team” followed a script to buzz up Ehrlich's fundraising and stature with untrue poll spin, and the Magellan Strategies poll release was carefully timed to muffle Mary Kane’s rocky debut because she is being sued by the federal government and she has been unable to answer basic questions about BRAC, taxes, and Bob Ehrlich’s budget proposal. A running mate who was supposed to be a slam dunk is off to a bad start, and Team Ehrlich needed to change the subject fast. Magellan Strategies came to Mr. Ehrlich's rescue with a cooked poll, and now Mr. Ehrlich needs to tell us the truth about who paid for it.
- Steve Lebowitz, Annapolis
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