This Is Why George Sinner Released That Bogus Opinion Poll

Last week the George Sinner campaign “leaked” an internal poll by a Democrat pollster purporting to show the candidate with a two-point lead over incumbent Republican Kevin Cramer. And by “leaked” I mean “gave to a friendly national journalist in order to manufacture a narrative.”

The poll is laughably out of touch. It claims to have sampled registered voters in North Dakota, where there is no such thing. North Dakota doesn’t have voter registration. It is telling that this poll has only been given to national media by the Sinner campaign, and used in emailed fundraising pitches to Democrat loyalists. Sinner hasn’t released it on his official campaign website as of the time of this post, nor has he posted about it on his Facebook or Twitter feeds.

But why would Sinner do such a thing? Why would he go through the trouble of paying for a poll, and then selectively releasing it to insider national media and Democrat fundraising lists?

Maybe this is why: “Party bosses place midterm bets”

That’s a headline from The Hill about Democrats going into triage mode with their 2014 candidates. National party Democrats are deciding where they’re going to put their money, and Sinner is no doubt hoping that some strong polling numbers (or, at least, the appearance of strong numbers) will be enough to lure some dollars into his race.

“Five weeks before the midterm elections, party leaders are peering into their campaign bank accounts, doing their math and trying to figure out where to put their money — and where to abandon hope,” reports The Hill, before recounting this story about former North Dakota Congressman Earl Pomeroy going postal when the DCCC wrote him off:

But Democrats may even have to abandon some incumbents if they decide they need to pour resources into a state or two to save their majority.

Former Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.) “blew his stack,” a former Democratic Party official remembered, when he was told that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee would not invest in his race in the final weeks of the 2010 campaign.

The veteran congressman unleashed a profanity-laced tirade that left one staffer so shaken that “it looked as if someone had waved a gun in their face.”

Pomeroy now says he harbors no hard feelings. He recalls being upset not so much by the allocation of resources than by the way the decision was handled.

“I felt like in 2010 they were not straightforward and we did get in the newspaper in unflattering stories,” he said. “I can’t argue with the triage decision made but it was executed very poorly.”

Maybe Democrats won’t be so ham-handed when the write off Sinner?

Or maybe they’ll choose to invest in his race.

The next fundraising reports for Sinner will be interesting. If there’s an influx of cash into his race it means national Democrats think he’s got a shot. but if there isn’t, it means he’s been left out in the cold.