Undecided and it feels so good

Google has this great service called “Alerts” essentially you can tell them which people, place, or thing that you want to track for updated news items on the Internets and voila, they send them to your in-box.   One of my alerts is, naturally, “Alameda.” So I get a lot of random things about the Raiders (because their headquarters are in Alameda) and other places not Alameda, California related, but that’s okay because they are fairly easy to weed through.

This one popped up in my mailbox last night, the headline:

Survey of Alameda Voters Finds Bringing New Jobs to Alameda, City Spending, and Wasted Taxpayer Dollars as Top Election Issues

So I got excited.   Survey! This must be the infamous survey (not the Push Poll, the one before that) that people had been buzzing about.

I clicked on the link to Magellan Strategies and saw on the side a “blog post” about the City of Alameda survey. Let’s put to the side the elephant in the room of who paid for this, we’ll chat about that later, and talk about the results!   What is awesome about the blog post is that they actually post a list of the questions and the results.   This is the “top line” results document which lists the questions, options and results.   There are also the verbatim responses for the top three answers to the open ended questions.  One, Two, Three.

So the big take away from the results are the rankings for Mayor.   Remember though, the margin of error is +/- 4.98% at the 95% confidence interval, here’s how it shakes down so far:

Marie Gilmore 18%
Doug Dehaan 17%
Frank Matarrese 10%
Tony Daysog 8%
Kenneth Kahn 2%
Undecided/don’t know 42%
Refused 3%

So what is striking at first is the 42% of people who said they didn’t know or were undecided on who they were going to vote for.   So, there are a lot of voters to be collected between now and election/absentee ballot day.    What is also striking is that it is Doug deHaan and Marie Gilmore in a statistical dead heat.   The one point lead Marie Gilmore has over Doug deHaan is meaningless given the margin of error of nearly five points.   But what also interesting is that even factoring in the margin of error, Frank Matarrese is behind.   Not way behind, but definitely third place behind.   But his third place ranking is also meaningless given that Tony Daysog is within the margin of error as well.

For the armchair political analysts out there, this is fairly grim for Frank Matarrese who has been running probably the best and most visible Mayoral campaign to date, only to find himself behind in the polls.   This is good news for Tony Daysog who has been running a really low budget  grassroots-y campaign but is still polling similar numbers to a sitting City Councilman and one who has been running for Mayor since January.

Seeing these numbers it is interesting that whoever made the push poll and flip flop video decided to go after Frank Matarrese.  The assumption given the target was that Frank Matarrese was pulling (or polling) way ahead of the others and therefore the one to beat.  I guess not.

An aside about the flip flop video, I understand that David Howard of Action Alameda is denying that he created and posted the video.   The amusing thing is that I was actually going to give him credit for actually creating a really good political ad.   I mean it was loads better than anything he had done in the past (both the things that he claimed and the unclaimed ones).   So before I had a chance to give him an “attaboy” for a succinct and effective ad, he — via intermediary — denies creating it.

Both Doug deHaan and Marie Gilmore have to be pleased with their numbers given that both have run fairly minimal campaigns thus far, although both are ramping up big time.

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