After being humiliated by 22 points, former big city mayor Kay Barnes must be wondering why they didn’t see it coming. Here are at The Source we are wondering too.
With great fanfare this past summer, Steve Glorioso, Barnes’ campaign director, driver, spokesman, personal trainer, et al- announced that the Feldman Group would be retained to do the polling. The Feldman Group is of course the home of…Roy Temple. “Temple and I can handle Roe,” Glorioso is quoted as saying.
However, it started to become clear in October that Barnes simply was not going to be a serious challenge to Graves. Public polling at the time had her down 9. The DCCC switched its advertising in the Kansas City market in mid-October from Barnes to Nancy Boyda. In fact, the only other race the DCCC pulled out of in 2008? Tim Mahoney- the guy in Florida who had an affair with one of his staffers and then allegedly paid her hush money from his campaign. (BTW…even he got more than 37 percent). By mid-October, Barnes was down 11 points in public polling and falling fast.
The Barnes’ campaign must have known the score. The Feldman Group, according to FEC online records, was paid over $26,000 for research in the third quarter including one in October. Did Roy Temple have radically different numbers than every other poll in the field?
We wonder because Barnes threw in $250,000 of her own money. What could convince a candidate to put two hundred thousand of her own money into a losing campaign? Did Roy even have a strategy?
Pollsters do not simply tell you the numbers, they tell you what issues will move voters and advise as to the best way to win an election. According to the St. Joseph News-Press, Barnes spent $21 per vote to get almost exactly the same number of votes for which Sara Jo Shettles spent $1.50 per vote. What was Roy Temple advising? Or was he just taking the money and watching the titanic sink from afar?
Here at the Source we are left to speculate. Either Roy Temple doesn’t know anything about polling or he didn’t tell Barnes that it was over. Instead, he let her spend her own dough, so that the money kept flowing to Steve Glorioso and the good time gang.
So your choices are:
A. Roy Temple- a pollster who advises clients to spend their own money despite knowing they will get crushed in the election? Or
B. Kay Barnes- so out of touch with reality that she thinks more money can fix any problem?
You decide.
C. All of the above.
Sam Graves will be our congressman until he decides to move on.
Posted by: northernthunder | November 17, 2008 at 11:16 AM