Earlier today, the Paul Dewar campaign released an internal poll of NDP supporters which purported to show that, on the first ballot of the NDP Leadership campaign, Thomas Mulcair would come in first with about one in four voters. Brian Topp would finish fifth.
The Topp campaign released this e-mail which campaign manager Raymond Guardia sent around in the wake of the Dewar campaign release (This if formatted as I received it):
February 13, 2012
To: Campaign Staff
From: Raymond Guardia
Campaign ManagerSubject: Dewar’s Poll
Earlier this morning, the Paul Dewar campaign released a poll that makes some claims about the state of the race.
Needless to say, we know from our own polling and canvassing that the findings don’t reflect what’s happening on the ground. In the past two weeks, our campaign has conducted live telephone interviews (not “robocalls”) with 7,500 confirmed voting members and 28% intend to vote for Brian Topp in the upcoming leadership race.
Why do we have such strong momentum? Because party members are responding very positively to Brian’s optimistic message about building a more equal Canada. They are looking for strong social democratic leadership that can win in Quebec, can win in Canada, and that can speak to Canadians fluently in both official languages. That candidate is Brian Topp.Thank you again, for all of your hard work in this campaign. As we enter the final weeks of this campaign, I say to you: let’s stay focused, and let’s get the job done.
Best,
Raymond Guardia
Canvassing or phonebanking is not in any sense comparable to a scientific poll. For one thing it’s a push poll where a volunteer is trying to convince you to vote for Brian Topp, for another most canvassing is targeted at areas where you expect to find a lot of supporters.
Topp’s team of course knows this quite well since they’ve conducted their own scientific polls, but that’s not what they chose to release.
Thanks for sharing this, David.
I’m a party member, I’ll admit, and not supporting either of the candidates mentioned above on first or second ballot. But I’ll tell you that all this positioning and polling and outright crap just makes me wish it was over already! Wayta to turn people off the race, boyz! Blech!
Polls really don’t mean much here when you have an elimination ballot. So Dewar/Topp can argue all they want but that will not over with the NDP zealots who want the leadership candidates to be civil.
I agree that Topp is the less attractive candidate. He like Nash is an old line new democrat who believes in higher taxes and re-distributing to those the they deem worthy.
None of these candidates qualify to be PM nor to head the federal government.