FLASHREPORT

Because there has been a little stir created over the "Straw Poll" taken at the State GOP Convention over the weekend, I thought I would take a moment to write about it for the benefit of FR readers.

First and foremost, there was no official California Republican Party straw poll taken of delegates or attendees to the convention.  As an elected party officer, I feel comfortable assuring everyone of that.  I even called my colleague, CRP Treasurer Keith Carlson, and asked him.  "Nope," he said, demonstrating a strategic use of brevity (not often exhibited by attorneys).

Yet a media release went out this morning from the DeVore for U.S. Senate Campaign proclaiming his overwhelming victory in the CRP Convention Straw Poll.

So what gives?

The answer is pretty simple.  The DeVore for U.S. Senate campaign conducted their own straw poll.  Their campaign printed the ballots.  Their campaign volunteers handed out the ballots to at least those coming out of the convention's Saturday evening dinner banquet, and completed ballots could be turned in right there -- or conveniently for DeVore supporters, right in DeVore's campaign hospitality suite.

From my assessment of the convention attendees as a whole, I think that if Price-Waterhouse were retained to conduct a straw poll, DeVore would still have won it easily.  So would Steve Poizner (who "won" the DeVore straw poll, which queried both races) -- though I suspect even in the DeVore-run straw poll, Poizner's lopsided victory might have been different had ballots been collected at lunchtime, when Whitman spoke, rather than at the dinner where Poizner was the speaker.

"Walking around the convention, the overwhelming support among activists in attendance was obvious," Carlson told me. 

The reality, having observed the process is that this "straw poll" was nothing more than an orchestrated campaign event by the DeVore campaign to garner some earned media.  Good for them.  I'm all for creative thinking.

The questionable part of the process was in releasing the "results" in a way that made it non-obvious to the reader that this entire straw poll was conceived, executed, counted and released by the DeVore for Senate campaign.

This severely impeaches the credibility of the results because of the obvious conflict of interest that exists.

There's story on this on the SacBee's website and over on CNN's website.  Probably a few other stories out there as well.

I wonder if this kind of tactic annoys people like my good friend Chip Hanlon over at Red County who posted up the poll results, but without any of this important information above to provide context.

On a closing note, the official statement from the Fiorina campaign on this included a reference to College Republicans and beer.  For the record, I saw a lot of College Republicans over the weekend consuming a lot of beer.  But I didn't see then holding and blue straw poll ballots ;)