Deceptive poll. I also didn’t see whether or not it was registered voters or likely. I will be very shocked if Begich wins again.
Democrat pollster Tommy Jensen of PPP had to resort to his entire bag of tricks to claim that Begich is still (barely) ahead.
For one thing, they asked questions about each GOP candidate first, and then asked the racehorse question for each candidate as the nominee, thus pushing supporters of a particular candidate to say that they wouldn’t vote for another Republican in the general (e.g., Treadwell supporters, out of perceived loyalty to Treadwell and in hopes that the poll would show Treadwell as running stronger against Begich than would Sullivan, saying they “don’t know” who they’d vote for if Sullivan was the nominee).
And even worse, they included every unknown third-party candidate imaginable, knowing full well that this early in the process they will get a huge number of false answers for those unknown guys, which has the effect of making a result in the low-to-mid-40s for Begich a “lead.” (PPP *always* releases one-on-one results when it’s basically an R vs. D race, but decided not to here: I bet you that the reason is that, even with Jensen’s thumb on the scale, both Sullivan and Treadwell lead Begich when voters are asked if they’d vote for the D, the R or “someone else” and leave it at that.)
Moreover, the sample had a huge number of minority voters (presumably Native Americans), much higher than what one would see in any AK election, much less a non-presidential one.
In conclusion, this is a *devastating* poll for Begich, although I’m sure that he already was aware that his only chance of winning is if Miller (bless his heart) wins the nomination and manages to blow the general again. Fortunately, it doesn’t appear as if Miller has a chance of winning the GOP primary against two fairly popular, and fairly conservative, Republicans.
BTW, I supported Miller in 2010 (as almost all conservatives who were paying attention did) because he faced the execrable RINO Lisa Murkowski, and would face a third-tier Democrat in the general, but given his implosion in 2010 and the fact that Begich isn’t a pushover I think that it would be foolish to nominate Miller this time—he really should run for a lower office and build a record before trying for the Senate again.