Heitkamp Leading By One Point According To Pollster Nobody Has Ever Heard Of Before
This evening I was surprised to get a press release from North Dakota Democrats touting yet another poll in the North Dakota Senate race that, unlike all the independent polling done recently, shows Heitkamp with a 1-point lead (down, apparently, from a 5 point lead in an earlier poll conducted by the company in October).
I hadn’t heard anything about this poll, but sure enough The Hill is reporting the results from the Pharos Research Center which is apparently operated by a former Gallup pollster.
Their polling memo, which looks suspiciously like something a high school student might slap together, is below.
It’s not surprising that North Dakota Democrats, desperate to prove that they’re still in this Senate race, would glom on to something like this but it’s worth noting that even the hard-left partisans at Daily Kos are scratching their heads as to just who this group is calling them “super sketchy” even though they’re showing a slim lead for Heitkamp in the Senate race.
Get this: The company claims to have released three other polls in the North Dakota Senate race, as well as races in FL, IN, MT, NE, OH, PA, and the city of San Diego and yet The Hill article seems to be the first time any of the polls have been reported.
The website for the group is super weird, looking like something from 1995, and they claim they’ve been in business for 30 years. Yet a search for records of any campaign or political party paying them for polling shows nothing, and if they’ve been around for 30 years why has nobody heard of them before?
If this polling is what North Dakota Democrats are hanging their hats on for the Senate race, they’re in trouble indeed.
Update: Guess when the Pharos website domain was registered? October first of this year, less than a month ago.
But remember they claim to have been in the public polling game since the early 1980′s.
Update: Stephen Leuchtman is the pollster behind Pharos. Here’s his Twitter account, where you can see that Mr. Leuchtman is a liberal and (surprise!) a Heidi Heitkamp supporter.
His Twitter account also claims he’s from North Dakota.
