Jacobs vs Rumler preference poll results in Rumler landslide

When readers were asked the question, "If the 36th District state senate primary were today, who would you prefer?" the result was both surprising (at least to me) and not even close.

Rumler wins by a landslide.

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The final true totals with "overvotes" eliminated are as follows:

Rumler - 81 votes or 81.82%

Jacobs - 16 votes or 16.16%

Other - 1 vote or 1.01%

No preference, too soon to tell - 1 vote or 1.01%

All the number crunching and hours of compiling, sorting, and eliminating duplicate votes has been completed, the numbers and votes checked, rechecked, and checked again, and all the numbers balance perfectly.

The poll was put up Monday the 9th at 10:00 a.m., and was taken down Friday the 13th at 2:46 a.m., thus running about 4 days.

The polling service reported the IP addresses of voters and by checking them for duplicates, I was able to eliminate those who voted more than once.

The vote count reported by the poll (which included repeat voters) is as follows:

Rumler: 103 or 79%
Jacobs: 25 or 19%
Other: 1 or 1%
No preference, too soon to tell: 1 or 1%

As you can see, even with the overvotes included, the totals vary less than 4 percentage points from the adjusted count with overvotes removed.

The total of votes cast was 130 exactly.

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Two votes each for both Jacobs and Rumler had been cast before I began tracking votes to eliminate repeat voting.

I counted one vote for those who voted more than once, and did not count the duplicates.

The total of "clean" votes were 99 (which is why the percentages almost match the vote count.)

Duplicate vote totals are as follows:

Rumler - 20 "bad" or overvotes from 12 voters
Jacobs - 7 "bad" or overvotes from 3 voters

for a total 27 "bad" votes.

Adding the total "clean" votes to the "bad" votes equals 126. Adding in the 2 votes for each (4 total) which were cast before tracking began, brings the total up to 130, matching the total votes reported by the polling service.

When posting the poll, I had assumed that Jacobs would manage a fairly convincing victory, so the results are surprising.

A few remarks may be in order as far as what this poll means.

The bottom line is that this poll reflects exactly what it is, namely, it reflects the preferences only of those who visit this particular site and who vote in the poll. Also, there was no way to limit voting to only those who both live in the 36th district and are registered Democrats. Therefore, of course, it is far from an accurate reflection of the voters in the district in any scientifically accurate sense.

I'm not sure how many people actually voted in the last Democratic primary for the 36th district (when was that? in '42?) but 126 individuals is a very tiny sample compared to the number of people who can be expected to show up to vote in the primary.

That said however, it is routine for polls to extrapolate poll results to the entire country based on a similarly tiny fraction, actually even smaller. They sometimes project voter preference for the entire country based on only a few hundred respondents, a far smaller proportion of the population than the respondents to this poll vs. the expected voters in the primary.

A few things might be surmised from the results.

First, the Rumler camp appears to have a superior capability to get out the troops to participate. They also might be seen to have a broader network of supporters who are online and who communicate by e-mail, etc.

Secondly, it might be suspected that there are more Rumler supporters out there than conventional wisdom might dictate. Of course, there's no way of knowing, but the results were so lop-sided that it can't be ignored completely. (though some will try very hard to do just that, I'm sure.)

It's been suggested that readers of this blog are overwhelmingly Rumler supporters. I'd have to question that assumption. The fact is that hundreds of people visit and read this blog, and it's inconceivable that they all share exactly the same views, much less all (or even most) support Rumler. I would suggest that there's as many Jacobs supporters who frequent the blog as Rumler supporters, perhaps even more, judging by comments left here. And it may be that a large portion of readers simply have no opinion one way or the other.

I'd also point out that it wouldn't be honest to accuse me of being a "Rumler supporter" based on this blog. I think I've only written about him once, after he announced his candidacy, much less promoted or speechified about why people should support him. Frankly, like many others I imagine, I don't know much about him. In other words, my often dim views of Sen. Jacobs shouldn't be interpreted as support for Rumler. If I chew on Jacobs, it's my reaction to the low-brow attacks here by him and/or his supporters and Jacobs often dim-witted pronouncements and actions elsewhere, not because I'm pushing Rumler.

But enough of that.... what do you think of the poll results? Are you as surprised as I am? What does it mean, if anything?