Election cycles and polling numbers seem to go hand in hand,
at least for national races who's outpacing who in a local election though
hasn't really been the standard here in
Iowa.
But that appears to be changing for at least one city of trees contest
just today. Polling data was released in the race to be Boise's next mayor
and the results may not surprise you, but
you might be surprised to hear who paid for it and what the poll tells us.
Joe Paris tells us about it
in a little more than six weeks. Idaho's capital city will elect a new mayor.
Two front runners right now.
Incumbent mayor Lauren mcclain and retired Boise police chief Mike Masterson
who will win.
Well, that's why we have elections so tune in on November 7th.
But before that, a real interesting development that happened just earlier. A
voter poll on the contest was published
by the national group public policy polling.
The group is recognized for legitimate polling
across the country and political races.
However,
the Mike Masterson for mayor campaign did pay
for the poll according to a campaign spokesman.
So with that in mind,
some of the data is tailored to that effort. But here are some takeaways anyways.
First, the parameters.
Public policy polling surveyed 651 likely Boise voters from
September 15 to 16 th of this year.
The margin of error in the survey is plus or minus 3.8%.
67% of the interviews for the survey were done through text message,
33% over the telephone.
So in the initial horse race question, as the survey phrases it
mcclain polls at 40% and Mr Masterson at 27% when asked about favorability,
respondents indicated that mclain is even with voters at
41% seeing her as favorable and 41% as unfavorable.
17 unsure
Masterson saw 28% favorable and 23% unfavorable with 49% unsure
a major piece of data here. 28% of those polls are currently undecided
Boise state politics expert Dr
Stephanie Witt says the polling appears to be
impressive so it wasn't just a quick call.
It sounded like a fairly extensive
polling effort when you think, you know,
historically about some of the Boise May oral races.
And you know, I'd never seen a public poll. I mean, what does that say to you?
I have never seen a poll in a Boise mayor's race.
Now,
that doesn't mean that someone didn't commission one
and use the results internally to the campaign.
But I've never, I've never seen one.
The survey indicates that after going through positive and negative messaging
to respondents mcclain's lead shrinks from 13 to 4 points.
Again, the Masterson campaign funded the
so questions could be tailored to a beneficial outcome. I asked Dr
Witt about the political strategy of releasing a poll like this.
The big key showing. It's a real race.
That's how I would interpret the usefulness of a poll like this to convince
donors. And of course, potential voters that you're a competitive candidate.
You have a shot at unseating mclean. Dr
Witt says the survey also highlights the overarching dynamic.
Being the incumbent has the advantage of everyone knowing your name.
And
so you have familiarity, you have name recognition,
but being the incumbent means that you're on the hook for how it's going and um
people will hold the mayor
responsible for things that aren't really directly the mayor's
fault or the mayor's ability to control it.
He doesn't have that yet, right? So
he's relatively unknown,
but he's also not having to um really bear the responsibility.
Another piece of information that I found pretty interesting in the polling
is they identified the two most important issues to Boise voters,
crime and safety, public safety,
I should say 15% and then housing affordability that was the most important to 19%.
And Brian, just to take note here, you and I were talking during the story,
I wanted to ask you is 651 a good representation, a good sample size.
It's a sample size.
And so just for a little bit of context in the last mayoral election in 2019,
between the former mayor Dave Beer,
current mayor Laura mcclain, 50,000 people,
a little less than 50,000 people voted in that final runoff between the two.
So if you were to take, you know, 651 or 652 whatever divided by 50,000,
it is a small percentage.
And that's the thing when you talk about polling is just how valuable is
this for the last several years when we're following the Boise mayoral races?
A lot of the times we look at the campaign
financing and the fundraising as kind of a metric.
This is the first time we've had access to something
like this as long as I've been in Idaho.
So it'll be interesting to look back at this in six weeks and say, ok,
how accurate was that?
It's a good point you make though is because, you know,
unless you call everybody on the phone, who's going to vote,
you don't know who's going to win until election day. So that spam come up delete.
That's true. So that's sometimes when they call, that's what this is. All right.
Thanks Joe.