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Offering commentary and analysis from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, The Cascadia Advocate provides the Northwest Progressive Institute's uplifting perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Tuesday, July 21st, 2020

More negative momentum for Tim Eyman: Scammer falls to 4% in new Elway Poll

Last Novem­ber, dis­hon­est ini­tia­tive pro­mot­er and chair thief Tim Eyman declared at a meet­ing of the Sound Tran­sit Board of Direc­tors that he would be run­ning for Wash­ing­ton’s high­est office in 2020. Eyman sub­se­quent­ly filed a dec­la­ra­tion of can­di­da­cy with the Pub­lic Dis­clo­sure Com­mis­sion and began hold­ing non­stop cam­paign events — some­thing he’s still doing today, despite the pan­dem­ic.

Despite hav­ing con­vinced reporters to cov­er his legal antics in oppo­si­tion to Gov­er­nor Jay Inslee’s stay home, stay healthy orders and despite being a reg­u­lar fix­ture on right wing talk radio (Dori Mon­son and John Carl­son just love hav­ing Eyman as a guest), Eyman has been expe­ri­enc­ing neg­a­tive momen­tum in his cam­paign. That’s right: Eyman has been los­ing sup­port as he goes along.

The huck­ster nev­er had much sup­port to begin with, of course, but it’s still notable that the evi­dence sug­gests his can­di­da­cy is going in the wrong direction.

If the lat­est polling is accu­rate, Eyman will not sur­vive the Top Two elec­tion, which is now in progress and set to con­clude next month. (The vot­ing dead­line is August 4th and the elec­tion will be cer­ti­fied two weeks after that.)

The trend is cer­tain­ly clear.

In Jan­u­ary, not long before Eyman announced he’d be run­ning as a Repub­li­can instead of as an inde­pen­dent, a KING5/SurveyUSA poll found Eyman at 11% against Inslee — more than any oth­er Repub­li­can can­di­date, but not by much.

In May, anoth­er King5/SurveyUSA poll found that Eyman had dropped to 8%, while remain­ing the top Repub­li­can con­tender by less than the mar­gin of error.

Today, a Crosscut/Elway Poll con­duct­ed just before vot­ing began found that Eyman had dropped to a mere 4%. (With respect to method­ol­o­gy, the poll has a mar­gin of error of 5% at the 95% lev­el of con­fi­dence; the sam­ple includes four hun­dred and two reg­is­tered vot­ers in Washington.)

Eyman now trails three oth­er Repub­li­cans (Loren Culp, Raul Gar­cia, and Joshua Freed) while still com­ing in ahead of his for­mer ally turned rival Phil For­tu­na­to, who has called this year’s Repub­li­can con­test for gov­er­nor “a clown race”.

Elway’s sur­vey finds that Culp is now the lead­ing Repub­li­can in the race, with 14%. The Repub­lic police chief has been pro­mot­ing his extrem­ist can­di­da­cy with bill­boards and online ads; he is well known among the Repub­li­can grass­roots, and it looks like his mes­sage could be catch­ing on with the par­ty faithful.

Raul Gar­cia — who has received the back­ing of the elder states­men active in the Main­stream Repub­li­cans of Wash­ing­ton — reg­is­tered at 6%, while for­mer Both­ell City Coun­cilmem­ber Joshua Freed received 5%, the equiv­a­lent of the pol­l’s mar­gin of error. For­tu­na­to received only 2%. 24% of respon­dents said they were unde­cid­ed; 46% expressed sup­port for incum­bent Jay Inslee.

If this polling is borne out by the actu­al elec­tion results next month and Eyman comes in sec­ond to last among the bet­ter known Repub­li­can can­di­dates (none of whom are a cred­i­ble chal­lenger to Jay Inslee), it would rep­re­sent an emphat­ic rejec­tion of Eyman’s tox­ic “mosh­pit pol­i­tics”, which he has erro­neous­ly claimed make him wide­ly liked by vot­ers and capa­ble of get­ting results.

It’s impor­tant to note that 24% of vot­ers told Elway’s inter­view­ers they were unde­cid­ed as to their choice for gov­er­nor. That group of vot­ers is larg­er than the group intend­ing to vote for Culp and iden­ti­cal in size to the groups plan­ning to vote for Culp, Gar­cia, and Eyman combined.

At least some of those vot­ers will prob­a­bly break for one of the Repub­li­can can­di­dates, while oth­ers may decide that they’d rather stick with Inslee even if they’re not enthu­si­as­tic about his third term candidacy.

It’s safe to pre­sume Inslee will secure the first place spot in the Top Two elec­tion. That means that only one of Inslee’s more than three dozen chal­lengers will move on to the Novem­ber runoff along with him.

Tim Eyman has been telling any­one who will lis­ten that he’ll be that challenger.

“For twen­ty-two years, I’ve won the sup­port of vot­ers — Repub­li­cans, Inde­pen­dents, and Democ­rats. Repeat­ed­ly,” Eyman boast­ed in a July 10th email.

“I firm­ly believe I will win the August 4th [Top Two] and be the can­di­date cho­sen by the vot­ers to chal­lenge Jay Inslee in the fall cam­paign,” Eyman yapped in a July 15th email, adding for empha­sis: “I’m con­fi­dent of that.”

Swag­ger all you want, Tim, but the vot­ing is hap­pen­ing now and the data sug­gests your cam­paign is going to end in a worse place then where it started.

It’s your name on the bal­lot this time, not a deceit­ful­ly word­ed bal­lot title that you select­ed when final­iz­ing plans to force a vote on one of your poor­ly writ­ten ini­tia­tives. Vot­ers will be pass­ing judg­ment on you instead of respond­ing to a one sided prompt that’s lack­ing in con­text. The clock is tick­ing — we’ll soon know how mil­lions of Wash­ing­to­ni­ans real­ly feel about your ego­tis­ti­cal candidacy.

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One Comment

  1. 402 reg­is­tered vot­ers does­n’t seem like a big enough sam­ple size to result in an accu­rate poll. I’m not an expert on polling, but it would seem at least 2 to 3 times as many vot­ers would need to be sur­veyed in order to obtain more accu­rate polling data. At least, that’s the kind of sam­ple size that was used in at least one of the pre­vi­ous polls men­tioned above. Also, a 5% mar­gin of error is rather large if a poll is going to be accurate.

    # by Kaleb Fisler :: July 27th, 2020 at 5:37 PM

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