TRUMP AND YOUNG ALSO CLIMB
With millions of dollars of negative advertising now pummeling Sen. Dan Sullivan, the latest news from pollsters has to worry the Alan Gross campaign.
A New York Times poll that skews left has Sullivan up by 8 points. But drilling down into the methodology, the advantage to Sullivan may actually be as high as 12 percent.
While the poll under-sampled the 2016 Hillary Clinton voters by 4 percent, it under sampled Donald Trump voters even more — by 8 percent. The NYT poll found that 32 percent of respondents said they voted for Clinton, and 43 percent said they voted for Trump in 2016.
The actual vote in 2016 was Cinton-36%, Trump-51%, and Gary Johnson, libertarian – 5.9%. That means the poll wasn’t sampling a valid voter base.
The poll also over-sampled women voters. 51 percent of respondents were female, while 48 percent were male. But in Alaska, there are 108 men for every 100 women. Women tend to vote more liberal than men and their answers skew the polls.
This is good news for the Sullivan campaign but also good for that of Congressman Don Young, which this left-leaning poll has up 49-41 over challenger Alyse Galvin.
In the NYT poll, Donald Trump is also winning Alaska 45-39 over Joe Biden.
The poll was conducted with 423 Alaskans between Oct. 9-14, and has a margin of error of 5.7 percent. That margin of error puts Trump, Sullivan, and Young solidly in the lead, even if the poll swings wrong in the challengers’ favor.
Gross had raised $13.9 million through September, while Sullivan has only raised $9.4 million for his race. Independent groups such as the Lincoln Project have spent tens of millions of dollars on attack ads to oust Sullivan. The spending is believed to be 4-to-1 to the Gross advantage.
A pollster hired by the Gross campaign shows him leading Sullivan by one point, 47-46, and shows Trump winning Alaska over Biden by just three points, 49-46.
Patinkin Research of Portland, which polls for liberals and liberal causes, reach 600 respondents; 56 percent were on cell phones, with the remaining 44 percent were on landlines. Little other data was revealed about this poll.
