Republican Tom Foley told a radio talk show host Wednesday afternoon that he was never ahead of Democratic Gov. Dannel P. Malloy in a Quinnipiac University poll last month.
Foley told WTIC 1080 AM host Will Marotti, during Marotti’s last broadcast, that Quinnipiac University got their numbers wrong in the Sept. 10 poll and the poll released Wednesday by the university that showed the race was a dead heat was more accurate.
“Quinnipiac made a mistake in their poll on September 10th,” Foley said during the broadcast. “They had the — they inverted the independents and the Dems on the turnout model, and when you take the September information and you put it in the turnout model that they used this morning, we were one up. So it’s gone from one up to even.”
The Sept. 10 poll showed Foley ahead of Malloy by 6 percentage points. The poll released Wednesday showed Malloy and Foley in a dead heat.
Quinnipiac University Poll Director Douglas Schwartz said Thursday that he has no idea what Foley was talking about, and asserted that all the numbers in the Sept. 10 poll were accurate.
As for Foley’s accusation that the polling institute switched the unaffiliated voter numbers with the Democratic voter numbers in the “turnout model,” Schwartz said: “That’s just not true. All the numbers were accurate.”
He explained that Quinnipiac doesn’t use a “turnout model,” which guesses what types of voters will head to the polls on Election Day.
Schwartz said he understands some campaigns use turnout models in their internal polling, but it’s not something Quinnipiac has ever done as part of their “likely voter” identification model. According to the Sept. 10 poll, 26 percent of the respondents were Republicans, 31 percent Democrats and 38 percent were unaffiliated.
The poll released Wednesday, Oct. 8, had similar “likely voter” demographics. Twenty-six percent of the respondents were Republicans, 34 percent were Democrats, and 35 percent were unaffiliated.
Like previous polls, Quinnipiac asks the voters if they consider themselves “a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or what?” The call center representative records the answer and the poll is weighted accordingly.
The October poll shows slightly more Democrats were surveyed, but none of the numbers in the September poll were transposed, Schwartz said.
Of the registered voters in the state, 38 percent are Democrats, 20 percent are Republicans, and 44 percent are unaffiliated.
