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Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

Second rate reporter says what?

75% of people clapping liked the show!

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Bark louder, little dog.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

How stupid are these people?

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Fight them, without becoming them!

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

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This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

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Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

“But what about the lurkers?”

You are here: Home / Political Fundraising / Targeted Political Fundraising 2023-24 / Screw the Recent NYT Poll for AZ – Arizona Is Absolutely in Play and Operation Blue Arizona is Laser-Targeted to Keep AZ Blue

Screw the Recent NYT Poll for AZ – Arizona Is Absolutely in Play and Operation Blue Arizona is Laser-Targeted to Keep AZ Blue

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Arizona is absolutely in play.

So, as one of Cole’s favorite sayings goes, Fuck those guys!  And their stupid poll, too.

As you surely all know by now, Operation Blue Arizona is a multi-faceted effort by Balloon Juice to:

  • keep Arizona’s 11 electoral votes
  • flip the closely-divided legislature from red to blue
  • unseat two virulently anti-choice state Supreme Court justices
  • elect the Democrat to oversee elections in Arizona’s most populous County, with over 60% of the state’s population

Here’s the original Operation Blue Arizona post, in case you want a refresher.

Balloon Juice Operation Blue Arizona

Who could miss the jittery pundit hand-wringing over last weekend’s NYT Siena poll, which purportedly showed Trump resurgent in Arizona?  The poll has Trump up 49% to 45%, the exact opposite of the result of the same poll in August (Trump is up 47-42 if you include third party candidates).

The same poll reflected Ruben Gallego polling 9 points ahead of batshit crazy quasi-human Kari Lake, suggesting some “ticket-splitting” may be at play in the Grand Canyon State.

Fun Facts

  • AZ  is experiencing rapid growth with a massive population churn
  • with a youthful voter base
  • and a substantial number of voters registered as “independent” (35%).
  • all of which make Arizona notoriously difficult to poll
  • and most importantly, neither our partners on the ground nor the experts are panicking!

More Fun Things to Consider

  • According to semi-reformed Republican strategist Matthew Dowd, the Arizona poll does not reflect the actual voting habits of Arizonans.
  • In the last two elections, all Democrats ended up within 2 to 2 ½ percentage points of each other, reflecting relatively little ticket-splitting in the end (despite early polls showing otherwise).
  • So we’re supposed to believe that Ruben Gallego is up by 9 points and Harris is down by 5 points?
  • Further, the same NYT poll reflected Harris up by four points in August 2024.
  • It defies logic that the candidates’ relative standing would have flipped in Trump’s favor after the debate.

Our partner, Worker Power is knocking on hundreds of thousands of doors motivating Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters to turn out.  They have over 500 trained canvassers in the field registering new voters in key swing districts. 

Our partner, Four Directions is expanding their efforts to turn out the vote in Indian Country by hiring more paid relational organizers.   The AZ Native community alone could deliver the state to Harris.

Whats at Stake?  (besides everything!)

  • 11 electoral votes for Harris
  • 2 flipped US House seats
  • Ruben Gallego’s Senate seat, which would help Dems keep the Senate.
  • Democratic majority in the AZ House instead of Republican control
  • Democratic majority in the AZ Senate instead of Republican control
  • a possible AZ democratic trifecta (governor, state House and state Senate)

Let’s do this!

So let’s buck up and kicks some Republican ass, shall we?

The registration deadline is October 7.  Early voting starts on October 9.   Every day matters.

Let’s prove the FTFNYT and its stupid polls wrong AGAIN!

I’l leave you with the words of Worker Power’s Executive Director:  Arizona is a must-win state for Trump, and we have the power to ensure he never steps foot in the Oval Office again.

Addendum: There has been some discussion about additional Congressional candidates in the comments.  There is a lot more money sloshing around in 2024 than in 2022, which is not surprising in a Presidential election year.   For the most part, we’re very temporarily holding our fire on most of these candidates until Q3 fundraising numbers come out (as early as next week).

Stay tuned for some possible specific candidate flash-fundraising in the very near future, as soon as we meet our goals for these two great organizations.

We have Angels for Four Directions (4x match until we hit $25k) and Worker Power (2x match).

Four Directions  (4x) – Angel is silvery!    completed!  (thank you silvery!)

Four Directions  (4x) – Angel is Marleedog!  

Worker Power  (2x)  – Angel is a lurker!

As always, to be angel matched, tell us about your donation in the comments or send email to WaterGirl.


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Reader Interactions

88Comments

  1. 1.

    waspuppet

    Jittery pundit hand-wringing? Please. They’re consulting their physicians regarding a certain condition lasting longer than four hours. They haven’t been this happy since they had Biden to harass.

  3. 3.

    japa21

    There is no way Gallego is up by 9 and Harris is down by 4.  As soon as I saw that I realized there was a  major problem with the poll.  Not that ballot splitting is unheard of, but this much is ridiculous.

  4. 4.

    Steve LaBonne

    Siena, in constructing its samples, models the electorate- nationally and in all of the swing states they poll-as significantly more Republican than any of the other quality pollsters. I don’t think this is malicious, but neither do I buy it. Also I don’t buy national polls that show Trump tied or slightly ahead. No Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote since Bush in 2004 and there is simply no explanation for why that should suddenly change this year.

  12. 12.

    Geminid

    @japa21: In 2020, Mark Kelly ran 44,000 votes ahead of Joe Biden in Arizona. That was with almost 3.4 votes cast, and I believe this was a 1.3% margin.. So yeah, there is no reason to believe that Kamala Harris is running as far behind Ruben Gallego as this poll suggests.

    That said, I think Gallego will run further ahead of Harris than Kelly led Biden by, because Gallego impresses me as as a very strong candidate and Scari Kari Lake is unpopular in Arizona. But I still believe Harris will win the Grand Canyon State.

  15. 15.

    Trivia Man

    @WaterGirl: No, Gallego vs Lake is a pretty big reason to get boots on the ground in Arizona. That race is mentioned here but should be on the short list. One voter can do a lot of heavy lifting in AZ,

  17. 17.

    BeautifulPlumage

    I’m still paying off the new clutch but I did get postcard addresses for Allred & Whitehouse, which I’ll finish tonight. I’ll ask for some AZ addresses next!

  24. 24.

    Sure Lurkalot

    I had asked for Arizona addresses for my last batch but got Sherrod Brown addresses instead (which was fine, sorry to hear his race with the “abortion is not an issue for women over 50” idiot is close.

    I’m thinking of trying a different outfit other than Postcards to Voters for my next batch.

  27. 27.

    Rose Weiss

    $100 to 4 Directions late last night. My plumbing bill was less than expected so I felt relatively flush.

  28. 28.

    BlueGuitarist

    rapid growth with a massive population churn

    And speaking of churn, Ben & Jerry’s has a new flavor: Churn Out the Vote.
    Maybe good for postcard writing, with or without company
    and/or getting people together to celebrate and vote

    AZ also has the citizen initiative to add abortion rights to the state constitution.

    There are also 11 bad ballot measures
    including one that will end retention elections for state Supreme Court justices and give them life terms, retroactively applicable to the 2 on the ballot this year.
    Republicans are hoping that people will be exhausted and confused by the ballot measures and skip them, so that even if people vote against retaining the justices, they could reverse that with fewer votes on the ballot measure.
    Also people might skip or not use all 3 votes each voter gets for the 3 seats on the AZ Corporation Commission which regulates energy/climate policy, D majority possible if we win all 3 seats.

  39. 39.

    Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)

    Hi W.G. Im in for another

    $100 for Balloon Juice for Worker Power Fall 2024 GOTV

    &

    $100 for Balloon Juice for Four Directions AZ 2024 Phase II

    Thanks

    MS

  42. 42.

    Trivia Man

    @WaterGirl: mrs trivia has lots of medical issues so we have a running joke. Every time a doctor says “that is so unusual! Ive never seen this before!” We but a lottery ticket.

  48. 48.

    piratedan

    @Geminid: hoping that Blue Guitarist will back me up on this…

    I honestly believe that the fate of the Arizona elections is going to come down to if the GOP can scare enough peeps with their border schtick one more time to hold on to offices or if that immigration fever has truly broken on the abortion issue.

    Lake is a shitty candidate, and both her and Trump are linked on the abortion issue and since Abortion is on the ballot and the GOP damn near had to be physically restrained from throwing themselves around a law created before Arizona was even a state that was tell that has been forgotten by many.

    If someone is splitting their ballot between Lake and Trump, I don’t know what to tell you because I have yet to encounter this mythical beast out in the wild.  Not saying that they don’t exist but law of averages would dictate that I would have seen at least one of them… The only semi-logical explanation I can find is an ultra-misogynist voter that will never vote for a woman EVER… could that be 13% of the Arizona electorate, I have some doubts.

  49. 49.

    Princess

    @piratedan: It’s a weird result. The same thing is happening in Nevada. Rosen, who is a woman, is way ahead of Harris-Walz. And senate races in NV are usually razor close.

  50. 50.

    Carlo Graziani

    A stat note on the Siena poll: setting aside all other modeling errors, a 2-candidate poll of 700-ish likely voters comes with a noise error of 4% on the degree of preference for one candidate. Which means an 8% noise error on the margin between the two candidates.

    “Noise error” (AKA “sampling error”) here means that all other things being equal, different random samples of 700 people would have shown a range of results, most (about 2/3) within 8% of the reported one. So a 4% lead is within the noise of this poll.

    I understand that Siena wants to keep its methodological standards high, by restricting itself to phone interviews. But the evident result is samples that are too small to probe uncertainties in tight races. Their polls ought to be complemented by other, higher-sample-size, lower-voter-model-quality polls, using modeling techniques to combine the strengths of the two samples. Or they should just grit their teeth and increase the sample size (doubling it would result in a 5% error on the margin between candidates). But as it is, their polls tell us little about the state of the race in Arizona or Georgia, and nothing about North Carolina.

  51. 51.

    piratedan

    @Princess: and coincidentally, these results are only exacerbated by polls from the “paper of record” which has demonstrated bad faith repeatedly in their framing of statistical data.  Why anyone would think that they wouldn’t cook the books on these polls strikes me as naive.

  52. 52.

    dkinPa

    Just donated $25 to Four Directions, and

    $25 to Worker Power.

    Thank you, WaterGirl, for setting this up!  Go Blue!

  76. 76.

    WaterGirl

    Even though the thermometer isn’t quite at $25k, it will be as soon as our Angel adds their $$.

    So Four Directions is now officially at 2x matching!  Same as Worker Power.

    Thanks to EVERYONE who is donating!

Comments are closed.