Thread: Conservative Allen West can WIN Florida Congressional Race!

Broward Politics

Ron Klein’s own poll shows he’s in a tough race with Allen West

By Anthony Man September 22, 2010 01:34 PM
Updated at 2:10 p.m. with comments from West's campaign manager.

An internal poll for U.S. Rep. Ron Klein’s re-election campaign shows he’s in a tough contest with challenger Allen West.

The Klein campaign put the best possible spin on the limited results it released Wednesday afternoon. It trumpeted a lead for the Democrat from Boca Raton, showing him with 48 percent of the vote.

West, a Republican from Plantation, had 40 percent, according to the Klein campaign.

That’s not necessarily as good as it seems. The campaign said the poll of 500 likely voters, conducted Sept. 14-16 by Anzalone Liszt Research has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points. What that means is the race is roughly even.

Readers need to be skeptical. The campaign released only the results for a few questions without any details, including the wording of the questions or the order in which they were asked. All those factors can skew results, which is why all candidate polls need to be viewed with some caution.

The Klein campaign declined to release any more information from its poll beyond a one-page summary.

Still, even though Klein’s own poll shows him with less than 50 percent of the vote, that’s not far from what he’d need for victory.

And his past victories have been close. He won with 50.9 percent of the vote in 2006, when he defeated then-U.S. Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fort Lauderdale. He won with 54.7 percent of the vote in 2008 , when he defeated West.

In 2008, West had little money and spent much of the campaign cycle as a military contractor in Afghanistan. This time he’s raised enough money to run a competitive campaign with Klein.

Klein’s poll shows he’s ahead in the most important group of voters: independents. The campaign reports their candidate is ahead among independents by 52 percent to 32 percent.

The Klein campaign’s analysis asserts that its candidate “is getting the better of the paid communications battle, and has tripled West’s unfavorable rating since April.â€

Great news!