The Phantom Poll

In the Wednesday evening Lincoln Journal Star, columnist Don Walton slipped in a doozy pertaining to his meeting with probable U.S. Senate candidate Mike Johanns. It went like this:

Although Johanns didn’t mention it, he had to be buoyed by the results of a GOP Senate primary poll taken in Nebraska last week by the National Republican Senatorial Committee (“NRSC”).

The results: Johanns, 58 percent; Attorney General Jon Bruning, 16 percent; former Omaha Mayor Hal Daub, 12 percent.

Bruning earlier released results of a poll commissioned by his campaign showing him trailing Johanns by nine points with neither candidate cracking 40 percent.

(Johanns ready to launch campaign – LJS – 9/26/07.)

Leavenworth Street has since learned, from various sources, more information about this. Namely:

• Don Walton hasn’t actually seen the poll;


• The “poll data” came to Don Walton via three Nebraska Republicans, two of whom are Johanns supporters;


• The NRSC is saying that they have “no intention of leaking or releasing any possible polling data from Nebraska.”

Now.

You can imagine that there are certain candidates and their campaigns who believe that this poll was made up out of whole cloth to show a much different picture of the current favorites. Others note that they don’t care about polls, and Dave Heineman didn’t care about them last year either.

Leavenworth Street is fairly confident, based on discussions with its sources, that it was an actual poll conducted by the NRSC.

As was reported in the OWH and other places, last week NRSC head John Ensign made calls to Rep. Lee Terry and Governor Dave Heineman to see if Jon Bruning and Hal Daub would clear the way for a favored candidacy of Mike Johanns.

Just about anyone who knows Bruning or Daub knows that wasn’t going to happen.

Nonetheless, apparently the NRSC polled to try to convince the other candidates that their attempt to resist the Johanns juggernaut was futile. Now to achieve that goal, their poll would have to be convincing, right? Some argue that to achieve numbers like they’ve quoted for Johanns, the poll had to have been pushed, and pushed heavily.

So there are some numbers out there. Who has access to them? Who knows? But they were “leaked” by someone, and it is just possible that Sen. Ensign and the NRSC haven’t given up on the idea of the Johanns juggernaut just yet.

In any case, you can’t really blame some Johanns supporters for leaking this poll information to assist their candidate. But of course, if the NRSC doesn’t release any information about it, or even acknowledge its existence, how will we ever know if the poll is accurate?

Does this smell fishy?

We’ll wait three days get further info.
And as most people know, at the end of three days, fish starts to stink.