by Brian Floyd
Mark Twain famously published that “There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Were Twain with us today he might add a fourth type of lie – political polling. Specifically, those polls released for public consumption.
Most campaign polling is internal, unpublicized, and genuinely used by campaigns to understand where a race stands. You will likely never hear about most of it, because that isn’t its purpose. These are legitimate benchmark and brushfire polls.Â
On the other hand, there are polls that are publicized because they are intended to make news. Such polls should always be treated with skepticism. Often there is an agenda behind any poll being touted publicly. The poll released on August 26th by Chaz Molder, the Democrat nominee in Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District, is one such poll the voters would be wise not to trust.
A two-page polling memo released publicly by Molder’s campaign makes the claim “This is a single-digit race that moves in Molder’s direction.” The memo also states that “Molder narrows the gap as voters get to know him.” But do these assertions about Chaz Molder’s chances in the November election hold up to scrutiny? No, they do not.
As a political consultant who has worked with some of the best polling firms in the country, and as a voter of the 5th District who was polled in this instance by the Molder campaign via text, I will say without equivocation that the Molder (pictured above) polling memo is a work of fiction.
The agenda behind this polling memo appears to be show that despite the strong Republican advantages in the 5th District, Chaz Molder is not a lost cause. The Molder campaign needs to do this to prevent his fundraising from vanishing. The memo gives this motive away, stating “With the proper resources to introduce Molder and combat partisan attacks, this is a genuinely competitive race.”
If that statement contained any truth, instead of publicizing a memo with carefully selected information crafted solely to benefit Chaz Molder, the campaign would have released all the poll’s topline questions and responses, along with its crosstabs. They did not, because doing so would undermine the fantasy narrative being peddled.
The first question that needs to be answered about the Molder poll is which voters were actually surveyed? Voter history in the new 5th District heavily favors Republicans. In the August 6th Election, the Republican Primary had 22% more voters than Democrat Primary. For the November 3rd General Election, turnout in TN-5 is projected to be 48% Republican versus 28% Democrat. The non-partisan Cook Political Report lists Tennessee’s 5th District as “Solid Republican,” noting “Hatcher is in a very strong position to win in November against Columbia Mayor Chaz Molder.”
Based on those factors, any legitimate poll of in TN-5 would oversample Republicans by at least 20 percentage points. While the memo does say the sample for the poll was 500 likely November General Election voters, it does not state what percentages of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents were surveyed.
Molder’s polling memo does however note that an additional 75 black voters were polled. With this information, even if the 500-voter sample was truly representative of likely voters in the 5th District, throwing in these 75 additional voters will naturally bias the poll towards Molder, since nationwide 49% of black voters are Democrats and only 9% are Republicans.
The second thing that needs to be examined is the actual questions the poll asked. Were the positives and negatives evenly split between the two candidates, to genuinely reflect the back and forth of the two campaigns slugging it out on the trail? No they were not.Â
Having taken this poll, in addition to the biographical comparisons the memo mentions, there were seven attack questions asked about Charlie Hatcher. All of them cast the Republican in a negative light to lead respondents to see him as self-serving, callous, and incompetent. On the other hand, three questions were asked about the Democrat. All three were positive and puffed him up to make one believe that if elected Molder would cure cancer, end hunger, and bring about world peace.
With these extremely biased push questions, coupled with a polling sample that oversampled Democrats, the outcome of the so-called informed ballot was never in doubt. When a campaign tests only the attacks it’s considering using against an opponent and does not test the vulnerabilities of its own candidate, the poll has been crafted to get a favorable result, not an honest one. That is the case with this poll done by Chaz Molder.Â
A poll genuinely crafted to discover where Molder stood with the likely voters in tTN-5 would have surveyed a representative sample of the electorate and tested his actual positions — not just the planned attacks against Charlie Hathce. Legitimate questions the Molder campaign should have asked about the Democrat include:
- Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for Chaz Molder if you knew he opposes the SAVE Act that requires proof of citizenship to vote in America’s elections?Â
- Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for Chaz Molder if you knew he supports the Democrat Socialists proposal to expand the Supreme Court by adding six liberal justices to the High Court?Â
- Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for Chaz Molder if you knew he supports men playing in girls’ high school and women’s college sports?Â
- Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for Chaz Molder if you knew he supports gender altering surgeries for minors that include the chemical castration of teenage boys and double mastectomies of teenage girls?Â
- Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for Chaz Molder if you knew he supports mass amnesty to make all immigrants U.S. citizens regardless of legal status or criminal records?
It is telling that Chaz Molder’s pollster didn’t ask these issue-oriented questions. Then again, fielding such a poll would have exposed the positions Molder’s worked hard to hide from voters. And that poll would have shown that Chaz Molder losing, because his extremist left-wing views are out of touch with the majority of voters in Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District.
That’s why it now falls to the voters of the 5th District to ask Chaz Molder the questions his own pollster wouldn’t. Where does he stand on the SAVE Act? On packing the Supreme Court? On gender-altering medical procedures for minors? On amnesty for illegal immigrants? Until Molder answers these questions in his own words, on the record, the only informed ballot in this race will be the ones cast in for the November 3rd Election.
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Brian Floyd is the Executive Director of the Tennessee Conservatives Coalition.
Photo “Chaz Molder” by Chaz Molder.Â
