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Posted on 10/06/2002 12:35:09 PM PDT by KQQL
Former Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg may have been gone, but apparently he was not forgotten by New Jersey voters.
A poll taken by The Record during the first few days of the Democrat's comeback campaign for a fourth Senate term found Lautenberg ahead of Republican Douglas R. Forrester, 46 percent to 40 percent.
Lautenberg campaign officials cheered the results.
"I think that's great, especially since by the time you got into the field [surveying voters], we'd been in the race for a day and a half," said spokesman Tom Shea.
But Forrester campaign manager Bill Pascoe noted that the Republican trailed Lautenberg by less than the poll's margin of error.
"What you've got is a statistical dead heat," Pascoe said, stressing that Lautenberg was under 50 percent.
The poll found Lautenberg had a higher favorable rating than Forrester and that more people felt they knew where he stands on issues. Also, a majority thought the U.S. Supreme Court should uphold Wednesday's New Jersey Supreme Court order allowing Lautenberg on the ballot as a last-minute substitute.
Lautenberg, who retired from the Senate rather than seek re-election in 2000, was tapped by Democratic leaders last week after one-term Sen. Robert G. Torricelli withdrew from the race under an ethical cloud and sinking poll numbers.
The Record Poll found that if Torricelli were still running, Forrester would be ahead, 49 percent to 39 percent. The main reason Lautenberg fares better against Forrester is a radical shift by independent voters, said pollster Del Ali of Rockville, Md.-based Research 2000.
The poll conducted by Ali found 55 percent of independents favored Forrester over Torricelli, but only 34 percent support Forrester when he is matched up against Lautenberg.
"The parties are unified behind their candidates, but the key is the independents, and that's the disturbing thing for Forrester," Ali said. "Independents just went back to Lautenberg."
The poll contacted 601 likely voters by telephone Thursday and Friday using randomly generated phone numbers in exchanges chosen to ensure an accurate reflection of the state. The margin of error, according to standards customarily used by statisticians, is no more than plus or minus 4 percentage points for each number.
This means that there is a 95 percent probability that the "true" figure would fall within that range if the entire population of voters were sampled. The margin of error is higher for any subgroup, such as party affiliation.
Pascoe noted that the 4 percent margin of error in the poll means Lautenberg's support could be as low as 42 percent and Forrester's as high as 44 percent.
Pascoe also argued that because of Lautenberg's experience in politics, he should essentially be considered an incumbent and Forrester a challenger.
"The fact that an incumbent is only drawing 46 percent of the vote is troubling news for an incumbent," Pascoe said.
Forrester has maintained that Lautenberg's entrance into the race was illegal, and Republicans are continuing to fight it on several fronts. Before answering questions about the poll, Pascoe said he was conceding only that that Lautenberg was a "potential rival."
Pascoe said he was not troubled that 61 percent of voters said they knew "not much" or "nothing at all" about Forrester's record and where he stands on the issues.
"What you're really talking about is the well-known difficulty of getting known in this state," Pascoe said. "We've had difficulty spreading Doug's positive message because it seemed every other day there was some dramatic revelation about Torricelli. It's been quite a distraction."
Democrats, however, contend that Forrester said repeatedly that his primary reason for running was to oust Torricelli, and that now he's grasping for a new message.
"They've spent $2 million on television and they've not done one issue ad," said Lautenberg spokesman Shea. "It's not surprising people do not know where [Forrester] stands on the issues, because he never talked about them."
The poll found 52 percent of voters had a favorable opinion of Lautenberg, a number Shea called "phenomenal," especially since the last time Lautenberg ran a statewide campaign was 1994. Twenty-six percent had an unfavorable opinion of Lautenberg; Forrester's favorable/unfavorable ratio was 43 percent to 21 percent.
Pollster Ali said one positive sign for Forrester is that he still has an opportunity to define himself for voters.
"He's got more room to grow than Lautenberg," Ali said.
Pascoe noted that twice as many people have a positive opinion of Forrester than a negative one.
Ali said Torricelli spent much of the summer trying to portray Forrester as an out-of-step conservative, but that those attacks seemed not to have stuck.
"Torricelli's credibility was so shot with voters, their reaction was probably, 'We don't know if it's true,'" Ali said. "Now, if Lautenberg comes after Forrester, it could hold more water."
Torricelli pulled out of the race Monday, 15 days after the deadline under state law. Since state law did not say what should happen when candidates withdraw after the deadline, Democrats asked for a ruling from state courts.
With historic swiftness on Wednesday, the state Supreme Court heard arguments and then issued a unanimous order telling county clerks to change ballots and mail substitutes for any that had already gone out.
Republicans said Democrats were trying to change the rules at the last minute, and the GOP has appealed the case to two different federal courts and to the U.S. Justice Department.
Democrats are hoping that voters who were turned off by Torricelli would welcome another Democrat and forgive the way the switch was made.
The poll found that 48 percent of likely New Jersey voters thought the state Supreme Court made the right decision in allowing Lautenberg on the ballot, while 34 percent thought it was wrong.
The rest were not sure. Predictably, Democrats strongly supported the ruling and Republicans strongly opposed it. Among independents, 52 percent thought it was the right decision; 23 percent thought it was wrong.
When likely voters were asked how the U.S. Supreme Court should handle the case, 51 percent said the court should uphold the decision putting Lautenberg on the ballot and 36 percent said the court should reverse it and keep Torricelli's name on the ballot.
Ali said home-state pride could explain why voters don't want the state Supreme Court's decision overruled.
"They could be saying, 'This is our state, it's our decision, these are our justices, and we're going to stand behind them,'"Ali said.
He also noted that New Jersey overwhelmingly voted for Al Gore over President Bush in 2000 and there could be some lingering unease in the state about the U.S. Supreme Court's involvement in elections.
That's a factor Forrester and the Republicans have to take into account as they decide how long to push their appeals, Ali said. Barring a quick victory in Washington, "at a certain point Forrester's going to have to say 'Drop this' and get it off the front pages because he needs to get out and define himself.
"If this carries late into this week, it'll become a negative for him," Ali said.
Pascoe did not disagree, but he said that Forrester got into the election because of "some very lofty principles, notably that no man is above the law. If you think about it, that's a serious problem Bob Torricelli had - that he thought he could get away with things.
"Politically, it would make sense for us to accept the ruling by the New Jersey Supreme Court and engage in a campaign against Frank Lautenberg right now. But Doug is unwilling to allow a horrible precedent to stand without taking it to the highest court in the land."
In New Jersey they define an independent as a Democrat that only voted twice in the last election.
"The small number of people sampled makes this poll worthless".
....and the fact it was randomly selected phone numbers makes it even more worthless and i might add, which phone exchanges were used would add to the poll being very biased
Anderson made his jump on that date. All those state laws WERE struck. Anderson lost the election, receiving about 5% of the vote. Here's the parallel:
The US SC took up the question of whether the state laws violated the First Amendment rights of Anderson and his supporters AFTER the election. It was not until 1983 that the US SC ruled that Anderson was correct, and those state laws were unconstitutional.
I now expect the US SC to do much the same thing concerning the Torricelli case from NJ. I expect them to decide the case AFTER the election, against Torricelli (and all other state courts which might consider rewriting their state election laws), and to do so well before the 2004 election, to cut off at the pass any future decisions like Fla and NJ.
Congressman Billybob
Click for "Til Death Do Us Part."
Both campaign people were engaged in some spinning but this takes the cake. Carter, Reagan, and Bush 41 all have stratospheric favorables today and the public hasn't voted for any of them for ten to twenty years!
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