This election cycle, the FlashReport is going to be partnering with various public opinion research firms to try and provide polling information in areas of interest. Since we’re always covering polls that other people do, how about some of our own?
Because FlashReport’s Publisher, yours truly, hails from Orange County, I thought we would start by looking at a big issue coming up in this neck of the woods — the race to succeed Orange County Third District Supervisor and longtime FR friend Bill Campbell. For this survey, we partnered with Wayne Johson and Val Smith, of SmithJohnson Research.
Ever since the rather high profile parting of the ways between Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas and former Assemblyman (and former Supervisor) Todd Spitzer (read: since T-Rack fired Spitzer who had been working as a Deputy District Attorney after leaving the legislature), rumors have abounded that Spitzer might run for his old job as a County Supervisor. He actually occupied the Third District seat before Campbell, and still has one allowable term under the county’s term limits law.
So, we polled how Spitzer does against a number of other potential opponents, then did a one on one question against the opponent who did the best. Then we went ahead and tested Spitzer’s vulnerabilities by throwing out some of the harshest critiques out there on him. We threw in a final ballot one-one as well (although readers should understand that this is skewed because respondents have heard some negative information on Spitzer, but not his top opponent, when the question is asked again).
- What other potential candidates did we throw into the mix?
- Who performs (or in this case, out-performs) Spitzer amongst those surveyed?
- If a voter is reminded that the DA fired Spitzer, does that impact their impression of him?
The answer to all of these questions are yours — just open the attachment below to read the short summary of this SmithJohnson survey!
I will "chum the waters" a little more to entice you to read the survey summary by saying that there is former Orange County officeholder who also lives in (today’s) Third District, who may feel very buoyed to run as a result of this survey!
Word is that Spitzer may announce as early as this week.
Finally, because our goal is to provide credible information with transparency, we asked Smith Johnson to post up all of the cross-tabs of the survey, as well as the actual survey questions. You can access that information here.