ND Democrats Citing Sketchy Polling

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Written By:
Rob Port

Oct 30, 2012
6:44pm

Last week I wrote about Heidi Heitkamp campaign, in trying to combat a raft of independent polling showing her trailing Rick Berg in North Dakota’s Senate race (the average of the last three polls has Berg up 5.7%), citing a Pharos Research center poll which showed her leading by one point.

The state Democrat party, and the Heitkamp campaign, referenced that poll (and a second one released since) heavily in emails sent out to supporters, but as I noted in my post there are a lot of reasons to think that Pharos (which is supposedly based in North Dakota and just registered the domain for their very sketchy website earlier this month) isn’t a reputable firm.

Now New York Times polling guru Nate Silver has posted a series of tweets explaining his doubts about Pharos:

Of particular interest is the fact that Pharos isn’t providing answers to questions about how they’re financing multiple polls in at least a half-dozen states. In the North Dakota Senate race alone Pharos claims to have conducted four polls, and the cost of that sort of polling is at least thousands of dollars per poll. I’ve checked into the price of polling before, and the cost of doing one poll in the state started at $8,000 when I was checking.

They’re also not providing answers to pertinent questions such as who they’ve hired to make the calls.

If North Dakota Democrats are down to hanging their hats on Pharos polling to prove they’re winning, or even just competitive, in North Dakota they’re in dire straights indeed.