What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This evening the Des Moines Register rolled out partial results from its first Iowa poll since forming a partnership with Bloomberg News on political coverage. The news isn’t encouraging for Democrats: State Senator Joni Ernst leads U.S. Representative Bruce Braley by 44 percent to 38 percent, outside the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 4.2 percent. CORRECTION: That’s the margin of error for each candidate’s support. The margin of error for Ernst’s lead over Braley would be larger.
I’ve posted excerpts from the Register’s coverage after the jump. The most worrying points include: Ernst has a double-digit lead among independents; her 25-point lead among men more than compensates for Braley’s 13-point lead among women; she leads among every age group (though only by 1 percent among senior citizens); Braley is not ahead in the first Congressional district, despite representing much of northeast Iowa since 2007.
Some Democrats have been grumbling this evening about the biased tone of the Register’s write-up. For instance, Jennifer Jacobs dwelled on Braley’s negatives, even though the poll showed a higher unfavorable rating for Ernst (44 percent) than for Braley (42 percent). In general, I can’t remember a Des Moines Register political reporter showing a stronger bias than Jacobs has shown toward Ernst this whole year. It’s remarkable. But that’s far from Braley’s biggest problem right now.
I expected the Braley campaign to respond that this poll is out of line with their internal numbers, or with other recent polls showing the IA-Sen race tied. But the memo from Braley’s campaign manager Sarah Benzing was much more alarming, since it accepted the Register’s numbers as a “snapshot of where this race begins” as voters start paying attention. It argued that the race was tied all summer, when “the TV spending numbers were closer to parity.” In contrast, “the Ernst campaign and its backers have spent over $500,000 more than the Braley campaign and Democratic groups on television” in the past two weeks. “Unless this disparity is equalized over the next few weeks, there is a real chance that spending by outside groups will determine the Iowa Senate race […].”
I’ve enclosed the Braley memo after the jump. There’s some happy talk about the Democratic ground game, which supposedly will deliver for Braley “as long as Democratic spending in Iowa matches the firepower that the other side is contributing to the air war.” Really, that’s your spin? News flash: Democrats won a bunch of close Senate races in 2012 despite being outspent on television. They were able to connect with voters despite that deficit. Moreover, pro-Ernst and anti-Braley spending will probably continue to surpass Democratic spending for the whole month of October. Braley’s campaign manager should not be suggesting her candidate can’t win under those circumstances.
Democrats need to hope that either Braley can turn things around in the debates, or that this poll will turn out to be one of Selzer & Co’s occasional misses (like when the Register’s Iowa poll had Terry Branstad 28 points ahead of Bob Vander Plaats a few days before he won the 2010 GOP primary by 9 points). It’s too bad the Register didn’t commission an Iowa poll shortly after the June primary, so we would all have a baseline for comparison. But Public Policy Polling has an Iowa survey in the field this weekend too, and claims Ernst is running ahead.
UPDATE: On September 28, Harstad Strategic Research released partial results from a poll conducted between September 21 and 25 for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. This poll showed Braley and Ernst tied at 42 percent each and Braley leading among independents by 40 percent to 36 percent. The survey drew respondents from the Iowa voter file rather than through the random-dialing method used by some pollsters. I’ve added the memo at the end of this post.
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