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# Primary Polls: California GOP On Knife’s Edge … USC Pollsters, LAT Weasel
June 02 2014
Written by Jerry Roberts and Phil Trounstine.
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***CAL BUZZ***-California Republicans stand at a crossroads: Will they join the ranks of voters in Kentucky, Georgia, Oregon and other states who have chosen Establishment conservatives over Tea Party knuckledraggers? Or will they add California to the roster of states like Nevada, Missouri and Illinois who chose teabaggers who later got skunked by Democrats.
Until this weekend, polls were suggesting that Assemblyman Tim Donnelly (photo left), the Tea Party “patriot” was on his way to becoming the GOP standard bearer by defeating former U.S. Treasury operative Neel Kashkari (photo right), the Establishment’s choice, in the open primary.
Neither of them has a prayer against Gov. Jerry Brown in November. No non-incumbent Republican has been elected governor of California after a primary election since Pete Wilson won against token opposition nearly a quarter century ago.
But the [USC Dornsife/LA Times poll](http://dornsife.usc.edu/usc-dornsife-la-times-poll-gov-jerry-brown-may2014/) released over the weekend found Kashkari slightly ahead of Donnelly in the race for second place and the right to lose to Brown in November.
“Among likely voters in the primary election, Democratic incumbent Brown has 50 percent of the vote, compared to 18 percent for Kashkari and 13 percent for Donnelly, with 10 percent of likely voters still undecided,” USC/LAT reported.
**Fun with numbers:** So at odds with other recent polls was the result, that the survey’s directors and the LA Times itself weasley called the race for second place “a statistical tie” and a “dead heat” – which they did because their finding was so close to the margin of error for likely voters in their poll.
In other words, the pollsters weren’t confident enough in their own results (or their model of likely voters) to assert that Kashkari has surged ahead of Donnelly. “It’s too close to call, but Kashkari has some momentum going into the final stretch,” Dave Kanevsky of American Viewpoint, the Republican firm that conducted the poll along with the Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, told the [LA Times](http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-pol-poll-governor-20140601-story.html#page=1).
And our friends Seema Mehta and Michael Finnegan (or their editors) at the Times chose not to buy into the survey’s actual findings, hedging their bets, writing: “The difference between the two vying for the second slot in the general election was within the poll’s margin of error.”
But according to the results released by USC, Kashkari’s 5-point lead among likely voters is actually just *outside* of the poll’s margin of error of +/- 4.4 percent for likely voters.
The race could be called a dead heat if you were looking at all the registered voters in the survey, where the results had Kashkari at 13 percent and Donnelly at 12 percent with a margin of error of +/- 2.9 percent. But then, you wouldn’t be relying on the voters you expect to be a part of the final tally. Moreover, among those who told the pollsters they’d already voted, Kashkari led 15-12 percent.
If you’re going to reject your own poll’s findings, you really ought to explain why.
**Bottom line:** Most Establishment Republicans are hoping and praying for Kashkari to win second place on Tuesday so they can avoid the inevitable investigative story that would follow a Donnelly victory – into whether their candidate actually has an opposable thumb.
***(Jerry Roberts and Phil Trounstine publish the award-winning [CalBuzz.com)](http://CalBuzz.com)***
***-cw***
***CityWatch***
***Vol 12 Issue 45***
***Pub: June 3, 2014***
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