Election Eve and the Last Polls Before Primary Day are Released
For those of us in the political world today feels little like Christmas Eve without the promise of salvation. We certainly will say a special prayer for the safety of campaign volunteers and staff who will spend most of their night placing signs in the ground near polling places. At least the rain will make the ground softer and therefore the task won’t seem like trying to penetrate concrete. If you make your way to the Cobb County Airport to see Mike Pence stump for Brian Kemp this evening, be sure to say hello.
Buzz and I talked on the latest podcast about how the folks over at Insider Advantage have done their level best to prop up the David Perdue campaign. From the beginning of the race, Matt Towery of IA has been openly cheerleading for Perdue, even going so far as laying out a road map to victory for Perdue that involved a heavy investment of cash and time by Donald Trump.
Further IA, specifically Phil Kent, has been banging the drum loudly for the failed Buckhead City movement. It is apparent that he sees his best chance at success for Buckhead is with David Perdue while he has insisted that the establishment of the new city is the most important issue to a majority of GOP voters. It is not, but a man can dream.
For the past several months polls have indicated that Brian Kemp is going to win outright tomorrow and avoid the runoff. According to every poll released during the last several weeks the only question is just how big Kemp’s margin of victory will be. During the last podcast Buzz predicted a win for Kemp with 60% of the vote. I said 54%. An hour after we wrapped recording Fox News posted a poll that had Kemp at 60%. I still think that is very ambitious, but a man can dream.
And then on May 22nd came the most recent IA poll which tried to reign in the Kemp momentum and put Kemp at 52% and Perdue at 38%. Towery claimed that IA had detected a surge for Perdue weeks ago that has gone completely undetected by every other polling organization. I’m smelling an outlier with bias sprinkles.
In my educated opinion, the most accurate Georgia based polling organization can be found over at Landmark Communications which is led by Mark Rountree. His pre-election polls are usually extraordinarily accurate. It should be noted that Rountree has had a very public break up with Brad Raffensperger after serving as his campaign consultant in 2018.
Rountree posted the results of Landmark’s final pre-primary poll on his Facebook page today which had Kemp over 60% and Perdue at 28%. And the poll went on to discuss the other major GOP races predicting a distant second place finish for Latham Saddler behind Herschel Walker, Hice and Raffensperger going to a runoff, and a probable win for Burt Jones.
Tomorrow will tell the tale on who is the most accurate in this cycle. But if Kemp does hit 60% the folks over at Insider Advantage need to do some soul searching on what type of organization they want to be known for. For those of us who have been paying attention, we see the blatant bias.