The numbers show that before anyone hears any messaging from either me or my opponent, I start out about six points ahead—and that lead increases to a whopping 12 points if we’re able to reach every voter we need to with information about my background and what I’ll do in the Treasurer’s office.
Essentially, this confirms what we’ve always known: that we have a winning message, but the greatest battle ahead of us is communicating it to voters, and being able to match or beat my opponent’s ability to do so. Those numbers in the second column are fantastic—but they’re based on people hearing our message. If people don’t hear our message, we won’t see those numbers.
Because as thrilling as this poll is, it’s not all sunshine and roses. Even after learning more about us, 12% of voters are still undecided. That’s more than enough wiggle room for my opponent to make up the gap and turn this into a 50/50 race that could go either way. And with an opponent who has deep enough pockets that he can largely self-fund his campaign, there’s a very serious risk that we’ll get outspent.
But maybe even more importantly, this polling—and all polling—is based on an educated guess, just like anything else we do in politics. For example, another poll came out this morning from the Carolina Journal that actually had my opponent up over me by two points.
A lot of the difference between polls is based on the pollsters making different educated guesses—guesses about what kinds of people will actually turn out to vote in November and in what numbers, and weighting their samples accordingly. You can poll the exact same group of people and get very different results when you make different assumptions about what “universe” will actually turn out to vote.
My team tried our best to poll a sample that we think will be an accurate representation of the voter base, rather than just the voter base we hope we’ll have. In fact, I personally asked that we try our best to poll a sample that will likely err on the side of underestimating our support rather than overestimating it. But even so, we could be wrong. In fact, the one thing I can almost guarantee you is that at least one of the assumptions we made will be wrong—that’s just how these things work.
So while this poll is very good news for us, I’m not resting on my laurels, and I hope that you won’t either. This race is still very much anyone’s race, and if we don’t have the resources to go toe-to-toe with my opponent in every corner of the state, we could wake up to a very nasty surprise on November 6th.
So, John, here we are. There is less than a month left until the start of early voting, less than seven weeks until election day, and we have a hell of a lot of hard work ahead of us if we’re going to get our message out there and win. We finally have really good evidence that our message is the winning one we think it is and that the momentum really is with us—but now it’s do or die, and our ability to catch that momentum and run with it… is up to you.
Because you’d better believe my opponent is doing his own polling and if he’s seeing what we are, he’s getting the message loud and clear that it’s time to start writing himself checks so that he can blanket the airwaves and drown us out. It’s absolutely critical that we don’t let him go up on TV unchallenged—but TV ain’t cheap, and in these crucial final weeks, I need to be out on the campaign trail talking to voters, not calling donors.
Basically, the work we’ve done over the last fifteen months has put us in a great position, but now it’s time to finish the job, and to do that, the fate of our campaign depends on grassroots contributions from everyday folks like you.
So if you believe in our message, if you believe in this campaign, and if you believe that we will have a better state when we have a Treasurer who is willing to invest in our people, then I need you, John. We are almost out of time, and I hope I can count on you to make a contribution today of any amount you can afford, no matter how small.
