Birmingham Mayor’s Race Poll
The Birmingham Times today has a poll on the Birmingham mayor’s race. However, I confess that, to my way of thinking, it is oddly reported.
The poll does not ask for whom respondents will vote. It asks respondents what their top four concerns are, and then it asks, “What mayoral candidate do you believe would be the more responsive to meeting your goals and expectations as it relates to your concerns?” They then report those numbers not including the undecided voters. Granted, the person they believe is “more responsive to meeting your goals and expectations as it relates to your concerns” is probably the person who will receive the vote, but why not just ask?
The results:
2 % Valerie Abbott
6 % William Bell
13 % Patrick Cooper
16 % Bernard Kincaid
8 % Carole Smitherman
55 % Larry Langford
Except that “Half of the voters polled on these dates stated they were undecided.” So actually, of the people polled, only 27.5% or so support Langford. Kincaid is at 8%, Cooper at 6.5%, and so on.
And a whopping 50% are undecided.
Incidentally, I have been conducting polls going back to the days when George Wallace was running for Governor and when he ran for President of the United States. I have never seen this many undecided voters so close to election day.
Conventional wisdom is that undecided voters will not break late for the incumbent so Kincaid looks in trouble. Larry Langford is so well known from his various roles that I have a hard time imagining that many of the undecideds will break for him. (He may be as well known as the incumbent.) Many of the undecideds will not vote.
Another interesting thing about the poll. “The polling was done in the larger predominately Black boxes.”
The question on some people’s mind is why these three or four boxes in the white community were not included in the polling. We have done four polls concerning the Mayoral election. The boxes in question in the white community have remained constant. Valerie Abbott will receive 48 percent of the vote, Patrick Cooper 28 percent, Larry Langford 14 percent and the remaining 10 percent is divided between William Bell, Bernard Kincaid, and Carole Smitherman.
What are the undecideds? We don’t know. (The %’s add up to 100 with no undecided voters, so we can assume that they left them out again.) Since the article doesn’t tell us, we can only guess, and my guess is that it’s lower than 50% reported in the other poll.
If Langford is at 27.5% in the majority black boxes, I don’t see him getting enough votes from the undecideds and the separately reported white boxes to get a majority. Unless all the undecided stay home.
If the incumbent Kincaid is second at 16% in the majority black boxes, I don’t see him staving off Cooper who is third in those boxes at 13%. Cooper is likely to get easily more of the undecideds, and shows much more support in the separately polled majority white boxes.
I read this article and, taking it at face value, it looks like a run-off between Langford and Cooper. The article correctly notes, “We must remember, it’s not over until it’s over and the only poll that counts is the one on October 9th.”
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this poll seems so shoddy that I’m not sure ANY conclusions can be warranted based on it.
Comment by Big Mo — September 27, 2007 @ 3:39 pm
I find it hard to believe that an poll, which is only a snapshot of voters feelings at the time, is recieving such critism. However, I guess that is the way of the world.
From my own experience the Birmingham Times has been right more times than it has been wrong in predicting who would be elected mayor (check the record). Additionally, I wholeheartedly believe, they got it right this time. Langford can and should win this election without a runoff; however, if he doesn’t I truly doubt his opponent will be Patrick Cooper. Quite frankly I find it amazing that you would even suggest that an unknown, non elected official, going against the likes of Kincaid, Abbott, Bell and Smitherman, all currently elected officials, is going to some how leap frog over these experienced, competent candidates, and pick up enough votes to come in second. Please remember, all politics is local, and even if any of them in not competitive citywide, I do expect them to protect their turf enough to stave off a surge by Cooper to garner enough votes to put him in second place.
It is obvious that you like Patrick Cooper an awful lot and want him to win. Yet, if you were to read the tea leaves you would quickly find out that Cooper he has serious up hill battle and will probably wind up in third or fourth - depending on some last minute campaigning. In fact, I predict the end result of the October 9th election will be: 1) Langford; 2) Kincaid; 3) Bell; 4) Cooper; 5) Smitherman; 6) Abbott; 7) Brooks; 8) Taylor; 9) Hendrix; and 10) I forgot the guys name — but it doesn’t matter anyway.
Comment by blackdog — September 28, 2007 @ 5:01 pm
We just finished conducting an extremely unscientific poll on our Election ‘07 site. A couple of things to take in account looking at it;
1)we still have to look at the zip codes that the votes came in from (preliminary is saying mainly from the city’s East side
2)It’s still a week to go and I think we didn’t get a great deal of turnout online because there are many undecided votes.
We’ll see when the one that counts takes place on October 9
Andre Natta
Publisher
The Terminal
Comment by The Terminal — September 28, 2007 @ 5:35 pm
[…] Which is not so different from what you could read between the lines (and we did) in an unusual Birmingham Times poll mentioned here last week. […]
Pingback by Langford, Cooper Top Birmingham News Poll » Doc’s Political Parlor — September 30, 2007 @ 3:55 pm