Angie Paccione is the candidate you guys raised over $22,000 for (and we're still accepting donations, just use the link in the left-hand column of this blog, or click on Angie's name in the sentence above). Marilyn Musgrave is the author of the anti-gay amendment to the US Constitution to ban gay marriage - she is a BIG friend of the religious right.
The new poll is, at worst, a statistical tie. Rob in Baltimore, our polling expert, talked to the pollster this afternoon - since this poll was commissioned by the Paccione campaign, we wanted to make sure it was "real" and not slanted. Rob says this is for real, and he's actually quited excited - which isn't easy to do with Rob if a poll isn't all it's trumped up to be. Rob also reports that Angie does better in this poll than she did in a poll by the same pollster several months ago - that means she's trending upwards, which is also good.
Here is what the pollster found:
Despite the findings of several recent public polls, there’s a reason that national Republicans — who notably face an ever growing and quite costly national playing field—have yet to pull their funding from the expensive Denver airwaves in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District. The reason is this — Angie Paccione and Marilyn Musgrave remain locked in a statistical dead heat, 45 to 42 percent, Paccione’s edge, with Eidsness capturing 6 percent of the vote* — stunning really when you consider that Musgrave and national Republicans have easily outspent Paccione and her allies by as much as eight-to-one at this point in the contest.
Among registered Democrats, Paccione leads 81 to 11 percent with 4 percent defecting to Eidsness. Among registered Republicans, 14 percent defect to Paccione, 6 percent to Eidsness, and Musgrave is at 71 percent. Among critical independents however, Paccione bests Musgrave by a whopping 32-points, 58 to 25 percent, while 8 percent support Eidsness.
In more good news for Paccione and her campaign, Musgrave remains critically wounded both personally and professionally, and it appears that her constant barrage of attacks on Paccione is backfiring to some extent. Indeed, Musgrave’s favorable-to unfavorable ratio has slipped from nearly dead even in late September to net negative today, with a plurality, 47 percent, giving her cool, unfavorable ratings, while just 38 percent giver her warm, positive ratings. Ninety-four percent of the electorate can identify her. Moreover, just under six-in-ten voters (59 percent) say that Musgrave is doing a fair-to-poor job in Congress, while just a little more than a third, 36 percent, say excellent-to-good.
* These findings are based on a survey of 600 likely November 2006 voters in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District. Calling took place from October 22- 24, 2006, and interviews were conducted by professional interviewers supervised by Strategic Services staff. The data were stratified to reflect the projected geographical contribution to the total expected vote. Registered Democrats comprise 29 percent of the sample, registered Republicans 45 percent, and 26 percent are unaffiliated with either party. The margin of error associated with these data at a 95 in 100 percent confidence level is +/- 4.0. The margin of error for subgroups is greater.
