Even Sam Brownback’s internal polling isn’t that good

Gov. Sam Brownback has been having trouble finding a poll that shows him mopping the floor with Democratic challenger Paul Davis, as almost everyone assumed he would when the Lawrence lawyer announced his candidacy last year.

In fact, the several early summer polls that showed the two men in a dead heat for the governor’s office have given way in recent weeks to a spate of reports that Davis might be pulling ahead.

The latest comes from SurveyUSA, which reported on Tuesday that Davis had a 48-40 lead among a sample of voters.

Seemingly annoyed with more questions about his viability as Kansas governor, Brownback denounced SurveyUSA’s work. 

“SurveyUSA has a history of inaccurate polling, and this latest release from the organization is more of the same,” said Brownback spokesman John Milburn (a former Associated Press reporter covering Kansas politics who recently took up ranks with the governor).

Of course, Brownback’s campaign didn’t find much trouble with SurveyUSA’s work back in 2010, when the firm showed him leading Tom Holland, the Democratic sacrificial lamb that year, in the governor’s race.

The Davis campaign did the yeoman’s work of plowing through then-Brownback spokeswoman Sherriene Jones-Sontag’s Twitter account to find this gem from 2010:
Now that Brownback’s camp is less fond of SurveyUSA, his campaign released its own internal poll. In a statement, Brownback’s campaign boasted that the incumbent had a 43-42 lead. Of course, the campaign seemed to have missed the part of the poll that said the margin of error was ±4.3 percentage points. That means a one-point “lead” really isn’t so much of a lead as it is a statistically meaningless advantage. 

While Brownback is casting aspersions toward SurveyUSA, let’s look at who his campaign paid to do its polling. The firm in question is Cole Hargrave Snodgrass & Associates, an Oklahoma outlet that boasts in its credentials that it’s not based on either the East Coast or the West Coast, as though the ability to conduct phone polling depended on geographic location.

As for its political orientation, the “Cole” in the firm’s name is Tom Cole, a sitting Republican congressman from Oklahoma.