Everybody's gone Survey...SurveyUSA...

Assuming SurveyUSA is responsible for this obvious error and that it's not just a media misprint, I want to know what they've been smoking at SurveyUSA. It must be some powerful shit!

I saw a SurveyUSA poll this morning that claims - in both Kentucky and Ohio - that in a general election match-up against John McCain, Hillary Clinton would actually do much better than Barack Obama in both states.

Ohio and Kentucky must be very, very special states then, because (with the exception of Hillary's old stamping grounds of Arkansas) all the polls I've seen show Obama being a much better candidate than Clinton in every other state. In fact, I saw a survey from a different source just a few weeks ago that showed Obama winning Kentucky against McCain, while McCain would have beaten Clinton.

Keep in mind these aren't polls for DLC-dominated primaries (which I'd expect Clinton to win), but for the general election that includes a lot of independents (who like Obama). The problem isn't that they show McCain doing so well but that they show Clinton as a much stronger opponent than Obama. I don't believe that for one second.

Everyone knows Obama would do much better than Clinton (nationally and locally) in November. I don't think there's much dispute about that (except from the DLC Flat Earthers). Working-class populists we meet each day clearly prefer Obama and are wondering why Clinton even stays in the contest. I strongly suspect my local news website (which is the only place I've seen SurveyUSA's latest poll mentioned) accidentally (?) switched the numbers around. If not, there's got to be something in the water over at SurveyUSA.

I consider SurveyUSA a Republican polling firm. A few days before the Kentucky gubernatorial election in 2003, SurveyUSA put out a press release claiming Republican Ernie "Hey Bert" Fletcher had already won the election. I firmly believe that this - along with the media's choice to call the election for Fletcher on election night before polls in the Central Time Zone had closed - swayed the so-called election.

It's a given that there'll be serious vote suppression in November - note the double standard governing "vote hauling" - but if people are naive enough to hop on the bandwagon of a poll that may have been misreported anyway, the GOP might not have to work very hard to rig it this time.