A new Susquehanna (R) poll, commissioned by the conservative Florida news site Sunshine State News, has first-term Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson trailing his Republican opponent, former state Sen. Dan Webster.
The numbers: Webster 48%, Grayson 41%, Tea Party candidate Peg Dunmire 4%, and independent George Metcalfe 1%. The survey of likely voters has a ±3.46% margin of error. In the previous poll from a month ago, Webster had 43%, Grayson 36%, Dunmire 6%, and Metcalfe 3%.
Grayson’s campaign put out a press release today, attacking the poll’s accuracy and validity:
As the Reid Report disclosed recently in a report called “Who’s Pulling the Strings at Sunshine State News,” the so-called “Sunshine State News” (SSN) is actually a mouthpiece for the “Florida Association of Professional Lobbyists,” as well as the Florida Retail Federation and Associated Industries of Florida. The Reid Report detailed SSN’s extreme bias in political reporting, and its fondness for fake and slanted polls.
SSN’s coverage of Congressman Alan Grayson has been relentlessly negative and biased for two years now. So it should come as no surprise that SSN has issued a negative and biased poll against Congressman Grayson, a week before the election.
The SSN poll claims that Republican Daniel Webster leads Grayson by 48% to 41%, with neither candidate claiming a majority. The crosstabs for the SSN poll reveal, however, that 46% of the respondents in SSN’s poll were Republicans. In reality, according to the Florida Secretary of State, only 36% of the voters in Florida Congressional District 8 are Republicans.
The SSN poll also slanted its results by discounting voters under 45 years old, a strong group for Grayson. Only 25% of SSN’s sample consisted of voters under 45. In reality, more than 43% of the registered voters in Congressional District 8 are under 45.
If the poll results are rebalanced to reflect the actual party registration and age distribution among registered voters in the district, then Grayson has a one-point lead, of 45% to 44%.
Grayson, of course, is the freshman Democrat who has become famous for his energetic attacks on Republicans, most notably his declaration that the Republican health care plan was for people who get sick to “die quickly.” He has also described Republicans as “knuckle-dragging neanderthals,” imagined Dick Cheney as a vampire with blood dripping from his teeth and turning into a bat, put out a hilarious press release against Sarah Palin, and crashed a local Republican meeting in his district.
He did, however, get in some trouble with the media for an ad calling Webster “Taliban Dan,” which apparently took video Webster out of context. Grayson later said: “”We let that ad run and die a natural death. Now we’re running an entirely different ad on the same point, because people need to know Dan Webster’s record.”
Eric Kleefeld
Eric Kleefeld joined TPM as an intern for the final months of the 2006 midterm elections, and then kept showing up for work. His other interests include guitars, old comic books and the politics of various English-speaking countries.
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