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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

15 points?

Stop the presses! Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels is endorsing Republican mayoral candidate Paula Hughes!

Actually, the more interesting tidbit doesn't come till the fifth paragraph:

Two sources close to Henry told NewsChannel 15 this week that the mayor's most recent internal poll -a scientific poll of 400 registered voters- shows Henry up 15 points in the race.

The Hughes campaign said it has not done any polling but feels good about the response to its voter outreach efforts.

I thought I'd see more about polling in the mayor's race by this time, but this is the first reference to a poll I've seen. That Henry might be ahead isn't surprising. He had a pretty rough first year and made all kinds of moves that could be called blunders, but then he had three years to nurture the power of incumbency. I would be surprised, though, if the lead were really 15 points. This is still a pretty Republican town, and Hughes has a good record on County Council. One factor is that the poll is of registered voters, and, as the story notes, polls of likely voters tend to be more reliable.

It's also surprisng that the Hughes camp hasn't done any polling. Such an effort can tell a candidate much more than the overall state of the race, such as where the candidate is weak and needs work and where the candidate is strong.

Comments

littlejohn
Thu, 11/03/2011 - 11:06am

I would have like to have seen more than 400 people polled. The consensus among pollsters is that in order to have a manageable margin of error, one needs at least 1,000. Still, I'm guessing Henry will win simply because he's the incumbent and the citizens don't seem to be particularly up in arms about anything he's done or failed to do. I thought the mayoral "debate" was a waste of time, but from a tactical standpoint Henry's decision to simply ignore Hughes and direct his statements to the independent who doesn't have a chance was pretty smart.

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