Shocker: Heitkamp Poll Doesn’t Break Down Sample By Partisan Affiliation
The Democrat spin on an independent Forum Communications poll released over the weekend showing Rick Berg with a 10 point lead over Democrat Heidi Heitkamp is that the poll didn’t sample enough Democrats.
Indeed, that’s a complaint Democrats wrote into a memo for their own poll results released today showing Heitkamp with a 3 point lead. “While much attention has been focused on a poll conducted by Essman/Research on behalf of The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, it is clearly an outlier,” reads the polling memo (see below) from Democrat pollster The Mellman Group. “The Essman poll has an absurdly small number of Democrats in their sample (19%). This fails to reflect the known electoral behavior of North Dakota voters.”
We can debate about whether or not that’s valid criticism of the Forum poll (I think it’s a little silly to look at 2008 exit polls when there was clearly a major shift in the ND electorate in 2010 when Republicans took two federal seats from Democrats), but as critical as Democrats have been of the Forum’s polling sample they haven’t released the partisan break down of their own poll.
Below is the entire polling memo released by the Democrats, and nowhere in it do they release the number of Republicans/Democrats/Independents they sampled.
If there was ever any doubt that this polling released by Democrats was intended to muddy the waters around independent polling favoring Berg (a gambit former Rep. Earl Pomeroy tried against Berg in 2010), let this glaring bit of hypocrisy lay it to rest.
