What The Poll Means
Possibly for competitive reasons (don’t give the other guys any ink) most of Vermont’s media has ignored the new poll commissioned by WCAX-TV (Channel 3), WDEV radio, and the Vermont Business Magazine.
Too bad. Almost all the poll results are interesting, and at least one of them might have immediate consequences.
Not, though, the one about the governor’s race, with which Channel 3, foolishly, led its poll coverage on its six-o-clock news last Wednesday
Foolish not because there was anything wrong with the report, done by the always-capable Kristin Carlson, but because when it comes to the governor’s race, the poll had…well, not quite nothing to say, but not much.
Certainly not much about who is likely to win the election, the subject of the report. In fact, the only reasonable conclusion to draw from the results is that neither Republican Lt. Gov. Brain Dubie or whichever Democrat wins the right to run against him is in the lead.
Neither is any one of the five Democrats over the other four, though one of them may be a bit behind the other four, a tentative conclusion considering that pollsters did not ask respondents about their preferences in the primary.
So the gubernatorial results require some intricate (meaning debatable) interpretation. Not so the results Channel 3 revealed the next day about what the state’s voters think about the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. They want it gone.
Not tomorrow. But just about half of the 400 respondents do not want to allow the plant to keep running beyond the expiration of its original license in 2012.
The important figure here, though, is not the 49 percent that answered “no,” to the question, “Do you think Vermont Yankee should get another 20 year extension to operate in Vermont?” The important figure is that only 27 percent answered the question with a “yes.” The other 24 percent? They said they were “not sure.”
Politically speaking, though, the result is not 49-27-24. Politically speaking, the result is 76-24.
That’s because the State Senate is scheduled to vote on Yankee relicensing Wednesday, and it’s reasonable to assume that the senators took a look at the poll to see what might be the political consequences of their votes.
No, the News Guy is not so cynical as to suppose that Vermont lawmakers cast their votes according to nothing but the public’s whim. Still, at some point in their decision-making cogitation, lawmakers are bound to wonder, for instance, what the political price might be for voting against Yankee’s re-licensing.
Now they know: Little or nothing. Because most of the pro-Vermont Yankee responders were Republicans, 57 percent of whom said they favored relicensing. Presumably those Republicans vote for Republicans, anyway. So the 68 percent of all lawmakers (and 75 percent of senators) who are not Republicans don’t worry about them anyway.
The bottom line: whatever the merits of the case, voting against Vermont Yankee is the politically safer option.
That’s because, politically speaking, the “not sure” answerers can be lumped in with the “no” answerers, leaving only the 27 percent who answered “yes” for “no”-voting senators to worry about.
Now to the somewhat more complicated interpretation of the poll’s findings on the election.
On its face, the poll was good news for Secretary of State Deb Markowitz, the only Democrat who finished ahead of Dubie. But it was barely ahead — 43 percent to 41 percent – which really means the two are tied. With only 400 respondents, the margin of error is plus or minus four points.
And remember, that’s not plus or minus the two-point spread between Markowitz and Dubie. It’s plus or minus each candidate’s support. Markowitz could “really” (meaning if all voters were polled) be ahead by 48-36, or behind 38-44, and the poll still wouldn’t be wrong.
The same holds for Dubie margin over Sen. Doug Racine who gets 38 percent to Dubie’s 43 percent, a five-point lead for Dubie, but still within the margin of error.
The other Democrats are farther behind. Against former state Senator Matt Dunne, Dubie leads 44-36. He leads Senate President Peter Shumlin 45 to 35, and Senator Susan Bartlett 48-30.
All of which means that…..(Tah Dah!)…more Vermonters have the foggiest notion of who Deb Markowitz and Doug Racine are than are familiar with the other three, Only 24 percent of the respondents had “no opinion” favorable or not, of the long-time Secretary of State. Thirty-two percent had no opinion about Racine, a former lieutenant governor who has run for governor in the past, while the “no opinion” response for Dunne and Shumlin was in the mid-40s and for Bartlett a whopping 63 percent.
Some political observers were surprised that so few voters seemed familiar with Shumlin, who is, after all, the Senate leader. Some political observers keep forgetting that while they and their friends and colleagues follow the doings of the State Legislature, they are in a small minority, in Vermont and elsewhere.
It’s early. Whoever wins the Democratic primary will, by that very accomplishment, become far better known, and therefore probably competitive with Dubie.
Unless, of course, they start sniping at one another. Voters, especially middle-of-the-road swing voters, don’t like intra-party bickering, and the danger to the Democrats is that they will squabble like alley cats, leaving the winner scratched and scarred.
Perhaps aware of this danger, the Democrats have been polite toward one another until…well, perhaps until last night, when Bartlett released a statement opposing the scheduled Senate vote on Wednesday.
The timing, she said, is “more political theater than making good public policy,” a not too subtle swipe at Shumlin, who scheduled the vote.
A bit of a gamble on Bartlett’s part. She might win by calling attention to herself, which, as the least known contender, she has to do. She might lose by seeming to agree with Gov. Jim Douglas, an association not likely to please Democratic primary voters. To be sure, she only agrees with Douglas on the timing; Bartlett is as opposed to re-licensing Vermont Yankee as Shumlin. Still, it’s a gamble.
And we probably won’t know how well it worked until July. That’s when Research 2000, the respected outfit which did the survey, will poll Vermonters again. This time, company president Del Ali said, the sample would be 600 voters, with an “over-sample” of 400 Democrats.
When those results come in, we might have some idea of who is really ahead. Right now we know only that Vermont Yankee is not.
