Here & Now

Charles Franklin on Polling Voters About Crowley and Tiffany

Frederica Freyberg:
Drum roll please. The first statewide poll conducted after the Wisconsin primary election finds a dead heat among registered voters in the race for governor. Same holds true for the partisan balance of the Legislature. Marquette Law School Poll Director Charles Franklin is here with details and insights. And thanks for being here, Charles.

Charles Franklin:
Good to be here.

Frederica Freyberg:
So let’s get right to it. Democratic candidate David Crowley ties Republican Tom Tiffany among registered voters at 44% each with 12% undecided. But among likely voters, Crowley comes in at 49% to Tiffany’s 44% with 7% undecided. What is this gap between the registered and the likely voters?

Charles Franklin:
It comes down to two things. One is Democrats are a little bit more likely to say they’re sure they’re going to vote in November, so they get a little bump there. But Democrats are also more loyal to their party’s candidate among likely voters than they are among registered voters. So you put those two things together, and that accounts for why it’s five point — still a close race, but a five-point lead with likelies while it’s tied with registered.

Frederica Freyberg:
Where do independent voters fall in their choice?

Charles Franklin:
First of all, pretty undecided. So there’s quite a bit of undecided independence. They lean towards Crowley more than to Tiffany, but with between a 30% and a 55% undecided rate, there are a lot of undecided independents out there.

Frederica Freyberg:
Why do you suppose there are a lot of undecided independents?

Charles Franklin:
Familiarity with the candidates is the number one answer. A little over a third of all registered voters say they don’t know enough about David Crowley to say whether they have a favorable or unfavorable view. Those with an opinion are slightly more favorable than unfavorable, but less than half as many say they don’t know enough about Tiffany to have a view, though there they’re slightly more unfavorable than favorable. So just as with the likely voters, you see a slight edge towards Crowley on favorability, but a lot of room for voters to learn more about Crowley and the campaigns to compete for whether they learn good things or bad things.

Frederica Freyberg:
Now, you also found the Democrats hold an advantage in the numbers, saying, as you said, they are likely to vote. But more Republicans say they’re very enthusiastic to vote. Is that a hangover from the primary race?

Charles Franklin:
It looks like it is. If you look at Hong — Francesca Hong supporters, they are several points less enthusiastic than are either Crowley supporters or Mandela Barnes supporters. So we were in the field starting the day after the primary. I think it’s kind of natural that if you supported Francesca Hong, you might be a little less enthusiastic after she so narrowly lost the primary. But when we look at how are those people voting, 98% of the Hong voters are saying they’re voting for Crowley. 99% of the Crowley voters are voting for Crowley. So I think we’re getting amazing levels of party unity within the Democrats, but a little bit of an enthusiasm gap, mostly coming from disappointed Hong supporters.

Frederica Freyberg:
Now the makeup of the Legislature, the partisan makeup, really hews to the same kinds of results that you found in the governor’s race.

Charles Franklin:
Very much so. It’s a tie with registered voters. It’s a slight Democratic edge, though a smaller one, with likely voters. This is a statewide look at if the election were held today, would you vote for the Republican or Democrat for Legislature? You really need to dial down into the 4 or 5 competitive Senate seats, the 6 or 7 or 8 Assembly seats with a statewide sample. We can’t say anything about those individual races.

Frederica Freyberg:
Except we could probably predict that it will all be close?

Charles Franklin:
It sure looks like it’s close. Boy, that’s a headline for Wisconsin politics.

Frederica Freyberg:
So I also wanted to get your take on fake polling conducted by an outfit called Median Strategies. Now, they released a poll in the Wisconsin primary, in California and Nevada, as you know, what was your reaction when it was determined that poll was entirely fabricated, supposedly as a social experiment?

Charles Franklin:
It’s pure and simple fraud. So this is a challenge to the polling profession, but it’s a challenge to the news media and all of us that try to interpret what’s going on in polling for the public. I just don’t think there’s a magic wand to make that kind of fraud go away. When anybody with a Twitter account can publish anything they want to claim they found in a poll.

Frederica Freyberg:
All right, we leave it there. Charles Franklin, thanks very much for your poll.

Charles Franklin:
Thank you.