So, I received a very interesting call on my seldom-used landline tonight. When the phone rang, I checked the caller ID as always do, since it’s a number I virtually never give out and I get a lot of SPAM calls on it. The ID said it was from the polling firm Dynata, so I actually picked up. Never one to dodge a political poll, I told the nice but obviously inexperience young woman that I’d answer their questions.
At first, it seemed like any poll. They asked to speak to the youngest voter in the house (which is me, though I’m probably not as young as they’d hoped at 57.) Then there was a series of standard polling questions about the presidential, NC Senate, and NC Governor races. Then the pollster went into a series of questions about recent news. They’d already tended to focus questions on the Senate race, so I had assumed they were doing a Senate poll or were working for one of the campaigns. Which one rapidly became apparent. After asking a couple of general open-answer questions about what I had heard recently about each candidate, they read a series of statements about both Cunningham and Tillis, but with a definite pro-Tillis stance. In particular, they were concentrating on two things: 1) the sexting scandal that just broke about Cunningham and 2) Tillis’ support for the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett. They were very obviously trying to test messaging to use to support Tillis’ voting to confirm Barrett before the election and to attack Cunningham on the sexting. Being the died-in-the-wool Democrat that I am, I did my best to make a hash of their polling and squash the messaging attempts. But it looks like the Tillis campaign is trying to see if the sexting thing will have any legs and to see if Tillis has cover to vote for Barrett. What the effects are, we’ll see, but voters in NC should be aware that this poll is in the field and they may be calling you in the next couple of days. It’s interesting that they were testing this message on me, since my area code identifies me as a Triangle resident, which is not an area where Tillis has as much traction. It may well be that they want to find out how to try to win back suburban voters in the Triangle to Tillis, but if that’s their aim, then they’ll need to do a lot better than this.