Safe at 2nd?

As mentioned before I want to revisit the recent Survey-USA poll on the 2nd CD "race" between Congressman Rick Larsen and "the guy who volunteered to lose to him this year" (aka, Doug Roulstone). In the snapshot taken by Survey-USA and King 5 TV over the last week of August, Larsen holds a comfortable 58% to 35% lead over Roulstone. Looking at the breakdown of the just under 600 registered voters surveyed gives us an even greater sense of the strong position Congressman Larsen finds himself in.

Out of 25 categories listed, Larsen outpolls Roulstone in all but five - three to be expected and two that leave me and Larsen's chief campaign advisor, Brooke Davis, scratching our heads. Larsen holds a 14 point edge -54% to 40%- amongst male voters while women prefer him 2 to 1 at 62% to 31%. He maintains that same 2 to 1 margin with every age group except the 18-34 year olds where the margin is only 4% (I can only assume that we will see the Congressman Larsen at as many local highschool and community college events as Brooke can arrange between now and November). Voters of every educational and income bracket seem to appreciate the job that Rick has been doing as he easily leads in each of those brackets.

The three areas where we would expect Roulstone to hold any advantage are amongst those who identify as republicans, hold a conservative ideology, and somehow still approve of the job that George Bush is doing mis-managing our country. However, even in those categories Larsen polls better with republicans than Roulstone does with Democrats with 21% of the republicans saying they will vote for Larsen while only 4% of democrats say they will arise from their meth induced stupor to cast a vote for Roulstone.

So the two categories that seem to be out of place? Within the racial mix of the 2nd CD, Blacks prefer Roulstone by 6 points - 53% to 47% and Hispanics give him and even higher approval at 49% to 38%. When I called Brooke Davis to ask if she had any insight to these numbers she told me that she was just as curious as I and would certainly be looking further into them. The one thing we both noticed pretty quickly was the sampling size of these categories. In this survey, Blacks make up only 1% of the total or roughly 5 voters while Hispanics accounted for 4% or some 23 voters surveyed. Regardless of the sample size, these voters are an essential part of the Democratic base and between now and November you can be sure that Brooke will be looking more closely into the concerns of these communities.

On the whole, I would say that Rick Larsen should be feeling pretty comfortable with his chances of returning to DC in 2007. At this point my only suggestion to Rick would be, if Doug Roulstone should happen to invite you to go on a hunting trip with his good friend, Dick Cheney, I would decline the invitation.

Peace,
Chad (The Left) Shue