Posted on 09/02/2011 9:18:19 AM PDT by Al B.
Fox News released its first poll Thursday since Rick Perry's entry into the presidential race, showing the Texas governor drawing 26 percent of the GOP primary vote and leading Mitt Romney by 8 points.
What caught one reader's attention, though, wasn't the size of Perry's lead, but the name of Fox's Republican pollster: Shaw & Company Research, a Texas-based firm that conducts the Fox survey in cooperation with the Democratic pollster Anderson Robbins Research. Continue Reading
The Shaw in Shaw & Company is Daron Shaw, a University of Texas political science professor and veteran of several GOP campaigns, whose name has been in the news a bit lately.
That's because Shaw is one of the starring players in Sasha Issenberg's e-book, "Rick Perry and His Eggheads: Inside the Brainiest Political Operation in America," which details a groundbreaking set of experiments that Shaw and three other academics conducted inside Perry's 2006 reelection campaign.
The Perry campaign allowed the so-called eggheads to run tests on "anything [they] could figure out how to randomize, from lawn signs to television ads," Issenberg writes, and they assembled a provocative set of findings on which kinds of campaign tactics really work.
Fast forward five years and Perry is running for president and Shaw is one of the lead pollsters for the most influential cable network, by far, among GOP primary voters.
Shaw told me this morning that there's no conflict of interest involved, since he wasn't paid by Perry for the campaign experiments and "because we're stupid, we never entered into any business relationship with Perry."
Nor, he said, was his role to advise Perry's reelection bid on strategy: "We'd just present the results and then the Perry people would do want they want."
Shaw was an analyst on the 1992 George H. W. Bush reelection campaign and the 2000 George W. Bush campaign. He and his Democratic counterpart, Chris Anderson, took over the Fox News poll earlier this year, but Shaw has been on the decision desk for the network going back to the 2002 cycle.
Though he has worked in political consulting, Shaw said he doesn't take federal or gubernatorial clients so as to avoid "even the appearance of a conflict of interest."
Ping!
I KNEW IT.
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I smell cooked numbers.
This reporter would be a lot more convincing if he showed the poll is out of sync with others. All the polls I have heard about lately show Perry jumping ahead of Romney, so to make the case that the numbers are cooked, some evidence would be useful.
This would be more significant if the poll results were at odds with others showing a significant Perry surge. In fact, Rasmussen shows him as the only candidate beating Obama. I remain a Bachmann supporter, but am convinced that Perry’s opponents will have to do better than that to take him down. His true test will be in the upcoming debates. If he is not at least slowed down in those debates, it is likely that he will be the nominee.
RUN SARAH RUN!
GO ROGUE!
HEADLINE: 74% DO NOT WANT PERRY~!
Rigged poll for Perry, aimed squarely at Palin supporters. It figures.
HEADLINE: 26% WANT SARAH PALIN TO RUN!!!!
yes... that’s it... every pollster is cooking their numbers to help Perry!
ROFL
You people need to get a grip.
Is that the same poll that effectively said Sarah Palin effectively held 25% of the GOP primary vote without campaigning.
All polls are cooked. They are used to influence people. Elections count. Polls are propaganda.
IT’S THE PALIN QUESTION, but nice try.
Rick Perry should stay out of the race 74% of Republicans don't want him to run!
we knew it, we stated it days ago
Polls are slanted and meant to influence. They are one of the most used propaganda tools there are.
Do you want to ping cincinatuswife? LOL
THE SOCIAL PROGRAMMING ATTEMPTS CONTINUE.
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