Did Urquhart’s Support Collapse?
One of the curious outcomes from Tuesday’s primary was the seeming collapse of Urquhart’s support. In the polling that showed the O’Donnell surge, Urquhart had a lead over Michele Rollins of 12% (50-38). This was really the first scientific poll of the race although Urquhart had an earlier poll showing a 5-7 point lead. The race ended up being much closer. Urquhart squeaked out a win of <1%, just 552 votes.
UNITED STATES SENATOR
REPUBLICAN PARTY
MICHAEL N. CASTLE 26201 820 27021 46 . 9 %
CHRISTINE O’DONNELL 29882 679 30561 53 . 1 %
REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS
REPUBLICAN PARTY
ROSE IZZO 2025 57 2082 3 . 7 %
MICHELE ROLLINS 26045 744 26789 47 . 7 %
GLEN URQUHART 26651 690 27341 48 . 6 %
Without a lot of polling it’s hard to say whether the PPP Poll was an outlier or whether there was a late surge to Michele Rollins. It is obvious from these numbers that a significant number of O’Donnell voters did not vote for Urquhart (30,561 for O’Donnell & 27341 for Urquhart).
Based on the stories we were hearing from people at campaign events, Rollins was a terrible campaigner (rather introverted) while Urquhart was a good campaigner (back-slapper). My observations last night (from the peanut gallery) was that O’Donnell had a small, loud, obnoxious contingent. This same group did not have the same passion for Urquhart.
I’m sure part of this is all the attention is part of the reason for O’Donnell’s more passionate support. But after listening to the debate last night I see where people might be suspicious of Urquhart. He’s a Beck talking point machine, repeating some of the more bizarre (and obscure) wingnut talking points:
– The federal debt is the most important problem ever, in fact he turned almost every question to debt in some way
– Urquhart worked for Reagan, did you know he worked for Reagan? Also, Reagan.
– The federal government has grown 25% since last year
– The debt is “Democrat debt”
– Debt is bad, it’s a job killer
– We should balance the budget, but also spend $10B building a missile defense because Iran is coming to get us!
– Abortion makes everything worse, it can never solve a problem (seemed jarring especially after hearing O’Donnell say she could support abortion in case of life of mother – her sister had gone through this)
– Abortion has “decimated minority communities”
– Government is huge & overreaching & regulations kill jobs
Glen Urquhart has charisma and he has an interesting biography. However, he came across as batsh*t insane and made O’Donnell look sane in comparison. It’s possible even the fervent wingnuts find him somewhat distasteful.
Tags: Glen Urquhart, Primaries, Republicans
Urq was the target of one of the most jarring things that I have seen this campaign season. I saw him doing his back-slapping, handshaking thing with one of the local Republicans (John Marino) supporters prior to the Peach Festival parade in Middletown.
Urq went to shake hands with one woman, who crossed her arms and said no. I have been doing this for several years, and it takes some serious anger to not shake someone’s hand, even someone that you disagree with on everything (heck, I was joking around with Bonini and Wagner a few months ago). I am not sure what caused this anger at Urq with a fellow Republican, but it seems to run deep.
As for Reagan, I love that picture of him and St. Ronnie… wait, there isn’t one? Oh, nevermind.
Well, I won’t shake Christine’s hand either, and I was almost faced with that last night.
Well LG, while you were stumpin’ and gladhanding at the Peach Festival, I was at the Amish auction going on concurrently. Urqhart shows up, storms in among seated patrons, extremely loud and boisterous about bailouts etc., all WHILE the Amish auctioneer is going. It was awkward to say the least, the Amish man said nothing (as I would expect), and actually we as patrons said “Move on”–how rude, and such. I left out the political party part, but some patrons did not. I just made it known this is certainly poor play for any candidate to crash something like that. Later that day, other candidates did show up, were very discreet and seemed to be there for the actual auction–no politicking–just friendly recognition.
And yes, I got a couple of great shovels for 4 bucks each.
Anyone born in the last 30 years has almost no recollection of Ronald Reagan.
Yes, but that doesn’t stop them from asserting the Reagan myths as facts with the utmost certainty. Those who didn’t actually live through the Reagan era are the worst.
(This timestamp thing is cool – I know what you are going to say before you say it!)
Anyone born in the last 30 years has almost no recollection of Ronald Reagan. That’s not going to get him traction.
So, basically Urquhart is rude & obnoxious. He came off that way last night, too.
I agree anon, Urquhart was speaking wingnut code which is incomprehensible to most people.
A friend who was at the Brandywine Art Festival said that Urq only approached male attendees to introduce himself to for the 15 or so minutes that they watched the gladhanding. Michele Rollins made the point of wandering over to my friends to introduce herself, but Urk kept looking for guys to talk to.
I don’t quite know what to make of what Cass just said…
Urky has been doing ok — typical talking points you’d expect out of any GOPer pol– until last night when he mentioned that we have to start up Reagan’s Star Wars shield again. The crowd reacted softly but firmly murmering WTF??????
Carney had a shakey moment too when he said that he would be happy to extend all of the Bush tax cuts because you don’t raise taxes in a recession and we have to watch the debt. Hint to John: the tax cut extention is a huge debt burden. Again, the crowd was quietly incredulous after he ran that one by us. ( I was sitting with liberals so I don’t know how the pockets of wingnuts were reacting).
Also, there was absolutely no ill will between the GOP candidates last night. When asked, Bonini passed facts and figures over to help Urky answer specifics on some questions.
The PPP poll wasn’t necessarily too wrong.
They had:
Urquhart – 50%
Rollins – 38%
Izzo – 3%
Undecided 9%
Actual results:
Urquhart – 48.6% (just over 1% off the poll figure and well within the margin of error of the poll)
Rollins – 47.7% (also known as 38%+9.7%, see below)
Izzo – 3.7% (very close to the poll)
Undecided/other ~ 0%
Notice the difference between Rollins’ actual results and her poll number is only seven tenths of a percentage point off of the “Undecided” figure in the poll. It sometimes, though not often, does happen that nearly all the “Undecideds” break late for one candidate. I’m not going to speculate on why that might have happened, although it’s worth noting the poll didn’t push/ask for the leaners, just whether or not they were undecided, which meant they could have been leaning toward her anyway all along. Nonetheless, to say the Urquhart’s support collapsed on Tuesday night when he only fell 1.4% compared to the poll is a bit of a stretch, in my opinion. Rollins performed better than expected (as did Izzo) but he didn’t really underperform. In fact, in the grand scheme of the race, he outperformed most expectations by winning! She was supposed to be the default candidate, and I was one of the few people saying early on that he was going to win but very narrowly. Sure enough he won and it was very close.
Also: It occurs to me that the reason I was able to predict his win before virtually anyone else (to my knowledge) on our side is that I speak fluent wingnut and the reaction in a room full of them is palpable when he speaks.
So basically, after the Newark GOP Debate on May 3rd, which I attended, I saw him in action, gauged the audience response, understood his rhetoric, saw his campaign staff, and I was clear on how he could and would win. It won’t play well at all in the general, but it was clear to me he was an excellent candidate for this year in a closed GOP primary.
UI, I don’t think you mentioned DEBT, and I understand it’s important. :p
I was raised by Depression Era parents. My MIL worked for 40 years and had zero credit history, because she never borrowed anything. Her teenage son had a credit card before she did. Those people have a positive mania about debt.
But how he figures to buy fancy antiquated missile shields without debt (and maybe a time machine) I don’t know. I can hardly get parts for machines I bought 5 years ago… where’d you get the transistors for whatever his notion of defense material is I do not know.
Do you suppose he’s heard of Ebay? 😉
I have to disagree with you slightly Bill. It certainly is possible that all the undecideds moved towards Rollins. I think we saw this in the O’Donnell-Castle race. Castle pretty much finished where he polled (around 44% – he finished at 47%). So the undecideds moved to O’Donnell. However, O’Donnell had some big boosts near the end – the Palin endorsement, the NRA endorsement, the DeMint endorsement then on election day Limbaugh & Hannity were getting people to vote for her. What would have happened to have a big move to Rollins in the end?
Yeah, this is confusing. All of my GOP insider contacts had Urquhart winning big. So big that they wrote off a Rollins win early. IMO, he should have done better than O’Donnell. The fact he didn’t raises questions.
Sitting at Timothy’s with UI… we were both fascinated by Urquhart’s close race.
Perhaps GOP voters thought that one crazy teabagger was enough?
Well, it may also be that Delaware voters, even R’s, don’t hate John Carney. They hated Minner, and they were taught to hate Mike, but general “keep the devil we know” prevailed a bit.
Well what I was saying is that that’s what I think happened, but I wasn’t offering a reason why. It’s possible there were a lot of people who were supporting Rollins originally, then moved into the undecided camp and then moved back. This can happen. Usually when people claim they decided how to vote when they got into the voting booth have already been leaning a certain way for a while but aren’t sure if they’ll commit. If a pollster had called me about the Treasurer’s primary, I would have said undecided, but in the end, I voted for the candidate I had originally been leaning toward and then wavering on. A lot of people might have planned to vote for her when she was the default and then decided to look at Urquhart when he surged, before going back to her.
BUT, I myself think this is a bit of a fishy theory. I’m just saying it’s possible and would support the data. I don’t necessarily strongly believe any of this; I just offer it for thought.
Yes, I agree Bill. In the absence of more data we’re left speculating. I actually think the most likely reason is that the polling data was an outlier on that race.
I just don’t see how it was an outlier because I think the Senate poll was accurate for that weekend (O’Donnell surged from there), and it was all part of the same poll. Unless there was a large bloc of O’Donnell-Rollins voters and the poll only got O’Donnell-Urquhart and Castle-either respondents.