Fact checking Kevin Landrigan: Pants on fire!

In today’s Telegraph column, Kevin Landrigan asks if Sen. Kelly Ayotte is “in free fall” over her vote opposing expanded background checks for gun purchasers. “Let’s not carried away with this,” he answers.

Landrigan then proceeds to make his case by discrediting Public Policy Polling, the pollster who released a survey this week showing Ayotte’s favorability rating has dropped 15 points since her vote.

Let’s ignore the perjorative slant, (“Fortunately, we have other data, and it doesn’t affirm PPP’s finding, to be sure.”) and focus on Landrigan’s argument, which is misleading and deceptive.

Strike one: Apples and oranges

Landrigan compares the PPP survey to a poll by the UNH Survey Center: 

But the notion that Public Policy Polling’s survey found that Ayotte’s favorability dropped 15 points bears further scrutiny. … Fortunately, we have other data, and it doesn’t affirm PPP’s finding, to be sure.

[T]he UNH poll out last week didn’t find any slippage for Ayotte. She was at 50 to 25 percent compared to 51 to 28 percent two months earlier.

Remarkably, Landrigan fails to point out that the UNH poll was completed before Ayotte’s gun safety vote!

Strike two: Party identification and unskewed polls

Landrigan echoes the discredited “skewed poll” refrain we heard from Republicans in the last presidential election, by suggesting the PPP survey oversampled Democrats:

The PPP also gave Democrats a 6 percent advantage in respondents over identified Republicans, while actual party registration in the state has both parties close to a statistic tie. 

New York Times polling expert Nate Silver knocks down that argument:

But pollsters, at least if they are following the industry’s standard guidelines, do not choose how many Democrats, Republicans or independent voters to put into their samples — any more than they choose the number of voters for Mr. Obama or Mitt Romney…. 

[P]arty identification is not a hard-and-fast demographic characteristic like race, age or gender. Instead, it can change in reaction to news and political events from the party conventions to the Sept. 11 attacks. Since changes in public opinion are precisely what polls are trying to measure, it would defeat the purpose of conducting a survey if pollsters insisted that they knew what it was ahead of time.

And Landrigan fails to point out the party identification measured by the UNH survey, which gave Democrats an identical six-point advantage!

Strike three: Never let the facts get in the way of a good story

As if cherry picking results from a previous survey discredits the current one, Landrigan looks back at PPP polling from Ayotte’s 2010 race:

Keep in mind that the Democratic-leaning PPP had 2010 Democratic nominee Paul Hodes within four points of knocking off Ayotte just prior to that election. Ayotte won by 23.

This is wrong. On September 15, 2010, PPP did indeed release a poll showing Ayotte leading Hodes by four points, 47-43. Six weeks later however — “just prior to that election” — a survey from PPP indicated Ayotte had widened her lead to 15 points, 56-41. Those results were similar to the 18-point lead measured by UNH, which gave Ayotte a 54-36 lead.

Our ruling

Landrigan compares the results of the PPP survey taken after Ayotte’s gun safety vote to one taken before — without issuing a caveat. He suggests a six-point Democratic advantage in party identification makes the poll unreliable, but fails to mention survey professionals disagree — or that the UNH survey has the same breakdown. He misstates previous survey results. We rate Landrigan’s column Pants on Fire! 

Gov. Lynch on O’Brien: I underestimated the venom

In an interview with Kevin Landrigan, outgoing Gov. John Lynch lambasted former House Speaker Bill O’Brien for an intentional lack of communication that led to a total breakdown in trust. Lynch conceded “he underestimated the venom that would greet him” from the former Speaker:

“I thought that I would still be able to work together in a collaborative way, much like I was able to do in 2005 with the Republican leadership at that point,” Lynch began.

“Before you can trust each other, you have to be able to communicate with each other. I stayed very much in close communication with the Senate, with the Senate leadership, but the speaker didn’t want to communicate with me at all.”

“When there is no communication, there is no trust and that is where that relationship really fell apart and it fell apart not only between the House and the Senate, between the House and myself but within the Republican caucus,” Lynch declared.

“Nobody trusted each other, and you can’t get something done if that’s the case. It’s true for this building as it is for private companies.”

Bill O’Brien: Ovide’s 800-pound gorilla

Kevin Landrigan says Republican candidate Ovide Lamontagne will lose the gubernatorial race to Democrat Maggie Hassan if he is not able to refute her assertion that “he is a Tea Party Republican who’s going to be an ideologue in the corner office.”

In some of these debates, we’ve seen him try to do that. He’s yet to really take on, however, the 800-pound gorilla in the room. That’s House Speaker Bill O’Brien, the controversial House speaker who is very popular among conservatives, but certainly among swing voters, Independents and moderate Democrats is not popular.

To this point, Ovide Lamontagne has not tried to distance himself in any manifest way from the O’Brien leadership. What remains to be seen is whether he’ll do that more between now and the election. He may feel he needs to, in order to beat Maggie Hassan.

Lamontagne disavows own Medicare position

In today’s gubernatorial debate at New England College in Henniker, Republican candidate Ovide Lamontagne ran away from his support for a state takeover of Medicare. Kevin Landrigan has the story:

Republican gubernatorial candidate Ovide Lamontagne Thursday tried to distance himself from his own support for the state to eventually manage Medicare coverage for seniors.

During a debate at New England College in Henniker, Lamontagne stressed Medicare is federally financed and a state playing any role in the future would rely on congressional approval.

“I am running for governor, not for Congress,” said Lamontagne, who did seek seats in the U.S. House in 1994 and the U.S. Senate in 2010.

Lamontagne’s health care reform plan on his own campaign website supports block grants for Medicare and the Medicaid, the health care program for the poor and disabled. [link added]

Landrigan: ‘Signs of a very fired up Democratic base’

Writing in The Lobby, Kevin Landrigan drills down into the Democratic turnout numbers for the September primary. The unexpectedly high turnout — the second highest in the party’s history — is just one more sign that New Hampshire Democrats are “very fired up,” he writes.

[B]ehind the numbers were other signs of a very fired up Democratic base.

The Democratic ballots cast in three counties, Grafton, Cheshire and Strafford exceeded those cast for Republicans.

That’s worth noting particularly in the western part of the state since neither Hassan or Cilley had any past experience or personal connection to turning votes out there.

Cilley hails from Strafford County — Democrat-rich territory to be sure.

Primary colors: NH GOP purges ‘moderates’

You can add “moderate Republican” to your list of favorite oxymorons. In last Tuesday’s Republican primary, a concerted effort by conservative special interest groups successfully targeted GOP lawmakers who failed to toe the ideological line on issues ranging from right to work and RGGI to marriage equality.

House Speaker Bill O’Brien, who easily won his primary challenge, was the big winner of the night. Many of the defeated GOP House members had been adversaries. Kevin Landrigan detailed the carnage:

Several social and fiscal conservative groups on their own, and in some cases in concert with others, were going after either pro-labor or socially moderate House GOP incumbents.

These conservative groups included the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire, Cornerstone Action, New Hampshire Firearms Coalition, New England Right to Work Campaign, National Organization for Marriage, New Hampshire Advantage Coalition and state chapter of Americans for Prosperity.

O’Brien insisted he didn’t advise leaders of these groups on whom they should work to help elect or defeat in GOP primaries.

Victims of the purge included Reps. Peter Bolster (R-Alton), Julie Brown (R-Rochester), Russ Day, (R-Goffstown), Richard Dwinnell (R-Fitzwilliam), Karen Hutchinson (R-Londonderry), William Remick (R-Lancaster), Tony Soltani (R-Epsom) and David Welch (R-Kingston).

The Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire, a group closely aligned with the Free State Project, claimed 86% of their endorsed candidates won on Tuesday. At least three of the six Republican “turncoats” targeted by RLCNH lost.

The six incumbents misrepresented themselves as Republicans and actively worked against Republican “campaign rhetoric” when they got into office, explained RLCNH chair Carolyn McKinney. “The elimination of just one of these turncoats is a victory for the people of their district, the state as a whole and the Republican Party, and we’re elated we were able to defeat three of them.”

Landrigan: GOP challenges Libertarian ballot petitions

Last week, Grant Bosse reported that Secretary of State Bill Gardner confirmed that the New Hampshire Libertarian Party had qualified for the November ballot by submitting over 15,000 petitions.

Not so fast, says Kevin Landrigan. Landrigan reports that the New Hampshire Republican Party challenged the petitions, arguing that state law requires the petitions to be signed in the year of the election. Many of the Libertarian petitions were gathered in 2010 and 2011.

Secretary of State Bill Gardner’s office essentially agreed with the Republicans that that is how he interpreted the law as well.

Attorney General Mike Delaney’s office, thelobbynh.com has learned, has essentially advised the Secretary of State Bill Gardner that this met the spirit of the law, that these petitions were all gathered after the 2010 election. Therefore, they were to apply to the next election in 2012.

The Attorney General is the final arbiter in interpreting state election law, so that’s pretty much where it stands.

It is not yet known if the state GOP will appeal the Attorney General’s decision in court.

Landrigan predicts Lamontagne, Hassan wins

Kevin Landrigan predicts wins for Republican Ovide Lamontagne and Democrat Maggie Hassan in tomorrow’s gubernatorial primaries:

Republican Primary
Ovide Lamontagne: 58%
Kevin Smith: 40%
Robert Tarr: 2%

Lamontagne ran a race like he never had before, aiming squarely from the beginning at the economic conservative base of his party, yet offering little to rally behind social conservatives that had always formed his secret weapon in primaries past.

Democratic Primary
Maggie Hassan: 47%
Jackie Cilley: 44%
Bill Kennedy: 9%

Hassan ran into a pit bull opponent in Cilley, who parlayed organized labor dissatisfaction with Hassan over retirement reform into key endorsements from powerful public employee labor unions.

Quote of the day: Nothing to do with substance

So what was all the fuss about? That’s simple and it’s got nothing to do with substance and everything to do with political tactics. O’Brien needed to signal to his conservative followers across the state and in his district that now is not the time to sit on their hands. … Anything can happen in a low turnout primary on Sept. 11, including your voters not bothering to show up believing their favorite candidate has nothing to worry about.

— Kevin Landrigan, on state House Speaker Bill O’Brien’s accusation that “union thugs” delayed his campaign’s mail.

Point/Counterpoint: What Paul Ryan Pick Means For NH

James Pindell, WMUR Political Scoop:

Lately, when Republicans win here, it is because the election has been framed about fiscal issues. When Democrats win, it has been about something else, like social issues.

With Ryan’s austere fiscal “roadmap” budget plan, he brings a strong fiscal background to this race, which is something that is likely to play well here. The challenge for Democrats is to either attack that plan as too extreme, or to make this election about something else.

Kevin Landrigan, The Lobby:

Romney’s not going to win New Hampshire because of who he picks as vice president. He’s not going to lose to President Barack Obama because of who he picks as vice president.

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are going to decide who wins New Hampshire and because New Hampshire’s a big swing state, it’s going to get a lot of attention from both tickets in the general election.

Who is the second banana really isn’t going to matter.

Today in the N.H. House: “Boring Work”

Today, the New Hampshire House met to vote on Committee of Conference reports for about 40 bills. Kevin Landrigan was there to tweet the results. Rep. Chris Serlin summed up the day: “Boring work.”

Quote of the Day: Bulls Marking Their Territory

The Legislature is approaching what could be called Hell Week in the House and Senate, where there’s a flurry of action, but not a lot gets done. House and Senate leaders, like two raging bulls, mark their territory in advance of financial negotiations on key bills.

— Kevin Landrigan, Nashua Telegraph