Say Anything Blog

That’s what Janell Cole at the Fargo Forum reports:

Rural votes across the country are shifting toward Democratic congressional candidates, the Center for Rural Strategies’ latest poll shows.

The poll of rural voters in 41 contested congressional districts showed that voters preferred Democratic candidates for the U.S. House 52 percent to 39 percent. In mid-September, voters were evenly split between the two parties at 45 percent each. Competitive rural Senate races are nearly evenly split between the parties, the poll shows.

“The numbers in this poll have to be disturbing to any Republican involved in the upcoming election,” said Bill Greener, a Republican strategist and consultant on the poll. “Republican success has relied on strong support from rural voters, and this survey indicates we don’t have that support today. We have to do better if we are going to reach our objectives on Election Day.”

I did some digging on this poll...and I was pretty shocked to find that Cole copied 2/3’s of this article (really just a blurb) from the Center for Rural Strategies’ press release on this poll verbatim.  Word-for-stinkin’-word.

Note the bolded paragraphs above.  They are exactly the same as two paragraphs from this excerpt from the Center for Rural Strategies’ website:

Rural battleground shifts toward Democrats

October 27, 2006

The rural vote has shifted in favor of Democratic congressional candidates in the last month, indicating Republicans are losing ground with a key constituency, according to the Center for Rural Strategies Poll.

The poll of rural voters in 41 contested congressional districts found that likely voters preferred Democratic candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives by a margin of 13 points, 52 percent to 39 percent. In mid-September, the same population of voters was evenly split between the two parties at 45 percent each.

In contested Senate races in states with significant rural populations, rural voters preferred Democrats by 4 points, 47 to 43 percent, reversing the 4-point lead Republican Senate candidates held among rural voters in mid-September. But those results fall within the poll’s margin of error.

“We’re seeing a real erosion in Republican support among rural voters, and that could determine who controls Congress,” said Democrat Anna Greenberg, one of the poll’s analysts. “There has been a perfect storm of issues that have led rural voters toward Democratic candidates—the war in Iraq, economic struggle in rural communities and a muddling of ‘moral values’ because of the Mark Foley scandal.”

“The numbers in this poll have to be disturbing to any Republican involved in the upcoming election,” said Bill Greener, a Republican strategist and consultant on the poll. “Republican success has relied on strong support from rural voters, and this survey indicates we don’t have that support today. We have to do better if we are going to reach our objectives on Election Day.”

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not exactly impressed with a reporter who copies whole paragraphs into her articles from press releases issued by special interest groups and then pretends like the words are hers.

As for this study, here’s where I have a problem with it:

The poll was conducted Oct. 22-24 among 500 likely voters living in rural parts of 41 contested congressional districts and six states with competitive Senate races. The margin of error is 4.4 percent at a 95 percent confidence level. The sample size is smaller for House and Senate preference questions (293 and 314 respectively), resulting in a margin of error for those questions of 5.7 and 5.5 percent respectively.

Five hundred voters out of forty-one congressional districts in six states.  That’s a little over a dozen people per district on average, or about 83 people per state.

Hardly the sort of sample size that’s going to convince me that there’s any big ideological shift among rural voters.

Update:

I attributed the above Forum article to Janell Cole, but I noticed that column has a by-line for both Janell Cole and Dan Davis.  So, obviously, either one could be responsible for the copying/pasting I point out above.