It’s not often that a member of congress resigns a month before election day. We had already decided to poll the FL-16 race in the second round of Majority Watch. Given Friday’s surprise announcement, we decided to go in the field this weekend.
Congressman Mark Foley will still appear on the ballot, but votes for him will count for the new Republican nominee, Joe Negron, named earlier today.
With very few exceptions, our election polls reproduce the actual information on the ballot. But this race is atypical. There will undoubtedly be a large effort to inform voters that a vote for Foley will not go to Foley, but to Negron instead.
Our solution was to do both.
In Form A, we asked 1,000 voters in the district about the election by describing it as it will appear on the ballot (ie Foley v. Mahoney). These results appears on the main Majority Watch site.
But we also conducted a second poll with Form B, where we asked another 1,000 likely voters about the race, but gave them the additional information that a vote for Foley would count for the new Republican nominee.
Here is the exact question:
I would like you to think about the race for Congress. Republican Mark Foley resigned on Friday as the result of a scandal involving a House page. Votes for Foley will count as votes for a new Republican nominee to be determined next week. Knowing this, if the election were today, who would you vote for? Republican Mark Foley? Or Democrat Tim Mahoney?
Neither approach is perfect. Obviously not all voters are aware that Foley has resigned, let alone that a vote for him will count for the new Republican nominee.
Likewise, substantial bias arises from providing information that will not appear on the ballot. Not all voters will understand that a vote for a Foley is now a vote for another Republican. And it probably won’t be the last thing they are reminded of before casting thier vote.
For these reasons, we are reporting Form A as our official result, but including Form B to provide context.
Links:
Commenting is closed for this article.
Interestig results, certainly. Form B is definitly biased, but that just speaks to the difficulty of polling this district. Voters are technically not voting for Foley, but do they know that?
When is wave 2 of all polls coming?
— LoverofPolls Oct 3, 08:21 #
what makes form b biased? seems less biased than form a.
— Ben Oct 3, 10:08 #
Form b is biased because voters will have none of that info when they vote. They will be asked to vote between Foley and Malohey, nothing more. Which is exactly what Form A asks.
— LoverofPolls Oct 3, 23:46 #