Democrats have taken issue with the methodology used in polls commissioned by Jane Hamsher's blog Firedoglake. Dems rip new Hamsher polls

Frustrated by a series of polls detailing the electoral jeopardy faced by a handful of House Democrats, the party establishment in Washington is pushing back against liberal blogger Jane Hamsher, whose prominent blog Firedoglake commissioned the surveys.

This month, at the request of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz issued a memo slamming the design and composition of the Hamsher-commissioned polls, which reported that four vulnerable House Democrats were in serious trouble.


In late January, a prominent Democratic polling firm, Global Strategy Group — which has conducted extensive work for the DCCC — put out its own memo questioning the accuracy of the automated polling firm, SurveyUSA, that produced the results.

Establishment Democrats, including the incumbents who were the subject of the polls and party committee charged with reelecting them, have sharply criticized the SurveyUSA polls.

“Let me just say that with respect to those polls, they are totally off,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told POLITICO. “We had the opportunity to compare those polls with polls that have been done in a professional manner, [and] the others are very different. So they’re not credible.”

The methodology is not the only issue Democrats have with the polls. By surveying and then reporting on the fortunes of members targeted by the GOP, Washington Democrats believe, Firedoglake’s outspoken founder, Jane Hamsher, is advancing a debilitating narrative about the party’s November prospects that will only exacerbate the problem.

“I think it, in some ways, gives momentum to the challengers and contributes to this narrative that Democrats are in disarray or in trouble,” Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.), one of the polled Democrats, told POLITICO. “And, by the way, that may be true in some districts, but I don’t think that’s true in mine or others.”

In any case, the GOP is reveling in the Democratic recriminations: The National Republican Congressional Committee has gleefully promoted the polls in news releases, including one titled “Bishop Gets Firedogged.”

Hamsher, for her part, has responded forcefully to the Democratic criticism, publishing on her website several memos from SurveyUSA President Jay Leve that defend the polls’ methodology.

In an interview, Hamsher said she conducted the polls in order to test support in swing districts for an individual mandate in a health care reform bill. With the future of health care reform now unclear, Hamsher said she is not planning any further polling on candidates.

She disputed the notion that somehow the polling advances a negative story line about Democrats and accused the party of shooting the messenger by engaging in a concerted campaign to taint the polling her site commissioned.

“We commissioned the polls prior to the Massachusetts election. So they actually were the ‘canary in a coal mine’ and preceded that piece of collective wisdom,” Hamsher said. “I think it’s pretty plain. [Democrats] don’t like the results of the surveys. They’re interested in discounting the accuracy of the poll for political purposes.”

“If they don’t like the poll, why don’t they release the polling of their own?” Hamsher asked.

A DCCC official turned down Hamsher’s challenge, saying the committee wouldn’t release its internal polling.

One House Democratic aide said the party decided to engage in a concerted pushback on the polls because, “in some cases, people had the perception the sky was falling,” and the questions about the surveys “needed to be told.”

A big part of the problem is that Hamsher’s polls have been covered extensively in the media — not just in national outlets, including POLITICO, but also in local news outlets that are more important to a member’s local political standing.

One of them, the Cincinnati Enquirer, published the mid-January survey showing freshman Rep. Steve Driehaus trailing former GOP Rep. Steve Chabot by a steep 17-point margin.

“You’ve got to quit writing about these crazy-ass polls,” Driehaus told POLITICO. “They’re horrible.”

“I think it feeds a story line the press is looking for,” Driehaus said. “The fact of the matter is that what’s so disturbing is so many organizations pick up and run with it without looking at what’s behind the polling. I mean, not all polling is the same. Some is more scientific than others. And this, at least when I looked at it, wasn’t at all scientific.”

Bishop, a fourth-term Democrat from Long Island, reiterated that point, calling the Firedoglake poll that showed him narrowly leading prospective GOP opponent Randy Altschuler “flawed” and adding that his own polling showed him “way ahead.”

Indiana Democratic Rep. Baron Hill called the survey showing former GOP Rep. Mike Sodrel within 2 percentage points of him “just not accurate.”

Global Strategy Group and Emory University’s Abramowitz both argue that the polling underrepresented voters ages 18 to 34, and Abramowitz said the wording of the questions about health care was “clearly biased and loaded.”

SurveyUSA President Jay Leve fired back to POLITICO, challenging Abramowitz to “send over poll questions that are not ‘clearly biased and loaded’” and promising to use them in a survey.

Leve also argued that the sampling of younger voters made sense because voters who participate in midterm elections are typically older. “There is nothing wrong with the poll. Polls were great. Tough times for Democrats,” Leve said.

Leve pointed out that he had designed the wording of the questions on his own without Hamsher’s input.

For House Democrats, the challenge of swatting down troubling survey data is a relatively new development.

“Even as recently as four years ago, there was relatively little polling in congressional districts until summer or fall of election year,” said Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin political scientist who studies polling. “The party has less control over this information. That’s an important change.”

And it’s not just Hamsher commissioning and releasing polls on individual House members. Public Policy Polling, a prolific Raleigh, N.C.-based outfit, has published surveys testing the reelection chances of endangered Democratic incumbents, including Reps. Larry Kissell of North Carolina and Thomas Perriello of Virginia and vulnerable Republicans, such as Reps. Joe Wilson of North Carolina and Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.

The trend is part of a broader proliferation of political surveying in recent years that has expanded the universe of available polling data beyond the numbers released by established firms such as Gallup and media organizations like NBC News and The Wall Street Journal. A host of organizations, websites and interest groups — many using less-expensive automated polling — now commission surveys testing issues or elections of interest to them.

Mark Blumenthal, a polling analyst and the editor and publisher of Pollster.com, said he counted a multitude of pollsters and organizations surveying January’s closely watched Massachusetts Senate race that had not previously registered on his radar screen.

“We’re just getting more and more data by more platforms than we’ve ever had — and it’s becoming part of the debate,” Blumenthal said. “Anybody can be a pollster.”

Pollster Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling said there is little question the wave of new surveys from organizations such as Firedoglake is shaping media coverage of the electoral landscape and reinforcing the oft-repeated view that Democrats in marginal House districts face political peril in 2010.

“The polls are definitely reinforcing the conventional wisdom that those swing-district Democrats are really going to have to fight,” Jensen said.

Much of the concern in Democratic circles is that Hamsher’s polls, in particular — and the ensuing media coverage of them — could play a role in pushing wavering swing-district Democrats who face tough reelection battles toward retirement.

Jensen said that Arkansas Democratic Rep. Vic Snyder, already the subject of several PPP surveys, announced his retirement on the same day that a Firedoglake-commissioned poll showed him trailing potential GOP opponent Tim Griffin by 17 percentage points.

Bishop and Indiana Rep. Baron Hill, another Hamsher polling subject, are also widely mentioned as potential Democratic retirees — though both insist that they are running for reelection and that Hamsher’s polling had no impact on their plans.

“In the case of myself, who has been an athlete for most of my life, it’s just the opposite. It backfires,” Hill told POLITICO.