Mourdock Camp Questions Independent Poll Results

By Steven Shepard  //  November 2, 2012 | 1:37 p.m.

The campaign of Indiana Republican Senate nominee Richard Mourdock on Friday called on longtime Hoosier State political observer Brian Howey to release the unweighted data for a poll he published in his eponymous newsletter that showed Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly leading by 11 percentage points.

The Howey/DePauw Indiana Battleground Poll was conducted by a bipartisan team of pollsters: Democrat Fred Yang, of Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group in Washington and Republican Christine Matthews, of Bellwether Research in Alexandria, Va. The poll is at odds with internal data released with great frequency by the Mourdock campaign since his controversial comments about women who become pregnant as a result of rape last week.

"Fred Yang is a well-known Democrat who works for the DSCC and has a clear conflict of interest in this race," said Brose McVey, Mourdock's deputy campaign manager. "Christine Matthews is backpedaling on this poll. Brian Howey scrambled together a conference call this morning to defend his weighted poll data, but said he won't release the original, unweighted data and cross tabs. Given these facts, Hoosiers have every right to be skeptical of this survey and we call on Brian Howey to change his position and release the unweighted data and cross tabs of this alleged poll."

But Matthews disputes the notion that she's "backtracking" from the survey. In an email to Hotline On Call, she asserted that comments she made on Twitter about the poll were misinterpreted.

"I am not in any way backpedaling," Matthews said. "I get frustrated when people think a poll that finishes a week out from election day is an absolute prediction of Election day outcome and vote spread." "I don't think Donnelly will win by 11 points, and the poll doesn't attempt to say that, but to try to explain via Twitter is hopeless," she added. The most recent Mourdock internal, conducted over the last two evenings, showed him leading Donnelly by 2 percentage points, 46 percent to 44 percent. That is well within the poll's margin of error of plus-or-minus 4 percentage points. While comparing surveys across pollsters can be problematic, the results for each survey are outside the other's margin of error, meaning that one of the polls would reflect the other's results fewer than 1-in-20 times. Matthews pointed to some key differences between the two polls that could have led to the disparity in results: the inclusion of cell-phone-only respondents and the composition of the poll according to age. "I would say we have a different opinion on the age composition (they have 56% over age 55) and we included 27% cell phones which, I think, does yield results that would differ if you only called landlines or had a small number of cells," Matthews said.

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