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November 05, 2006 02:22 AM UTC

Associated Press Drinks Beauprez Kool-Aid

  • 23 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

Associated Press reporter Steve Paulson is back on the imaginary governor’s race beat.

In late September, Paulson wrote a story indicating that the governor’s race was a toss-up. Of course, nothing in the polls or the press would have indicated that Republican Bob Beauprez was anywhere near Democrat Bill Ritter at the time, but the race was at least closer then than it is today.

Paulson, however, is back at it again, saying that Beauprez is pulling closer to Ritter…despite a plethora of polls showing that Beauprez is actually losing ground in recent weeks. In fact, the most recent poll showed Ritter with a 22-point lead – the biggest margin in the race thus far.

As Colorado Media Matters reports:

The Associated Press reported that Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez was “gaining some ground” against Democratic opponent Bill Ritter but offered no evidence to support that claim. In fact, the most recent publicly available polls show Ritter increasing his lead over Beauprez within the margin of error.

One day after the Rocky Mountain News noted in regard to a poll it sponsored that “Republican Bob Beauprez has failed to gain any ground on Democrat Bill Ritter in the Colorado governor’s race,” the Associated Press reported that “[r]ecent polls have shown” Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez “gaining some ground against Democrat Bill Ritter.” The AP cited no polls to support this claim. In fact, the two most recent publicly available polls have shown that Ritter has increased his lead within the margin of error since the previous installments of those polls. As Colorado Media Matters has noted, both polls showed Ritter leading by 22 percentage points.

Paulson’s story is so inaccurate that he is reporting the exact opposite of what is really happening in the governor’s race. It’s hard to be any more wrong than this.

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23 thoughts on “Associated Press Drinks Beauprez Kool-Aid”

    1. Regular Zogby International has yet to do a poll in this race, despite misleading press releases from the Beauprez camp. Rather, a branch of Zogby International called Zogby Interactive has done multiple online polls. The polls are not conducted by random sample. You sign up to take the polls and I’m sure there is some memo going around GOP circles for everyone to sign up as a Dem. If you compare Zogby Interactive polls with EVERY other poll in this race, they are clearly off base.

      If you don’t believe me… no problem. Just wait for Tuesday and we will see whether this race is “neck and neck” or a comfortable margin for Ritter.

    1. There are no polls showing Beauprez closing the gap. The only polls show Beauprez LOSING ground. The AP story is dead wrong, and that has nothing to do with bias – it’s just wrong.

    2. There is a difference between a paper printing a story based on fact, an event, polling numbers, etc. and a writer creating a fictional story.  Paulson may be out of touch with reality as about as much as Bush is with regards to the war in Iraq.

      Beauprez’s numbers are falling, but his campaign and Paulson are declaring Victory!  Much like Bush’s “so-called war plan” is full steam ahead for Victory, after one of the deadliest of months of the war, three years after he originally declared Victory upon the USS Abraham. 

      Stupid is as stupid does… I guess.

    4. Look, Beauprez’s manager surely knows that this is a joke. Yet he reports for a second time that they are close, even though reputable polls show Ritter increasing his lead to a total route. What this, and Ritter’s earlier ads, show is that he is a consumate liar who does not care about the means, only the end. Roughly, bwb has no character or moral fiber.

      Honestly, this is the problem with the republican party as it currently stands. It is corrupt and full of cowards, liars, and traitors. Worse, the GOP voters keep drinking the kool-aid.

  4. Can anyone suggest a reason why Paulson does this?  AP is not a propoganda machine so far as I know, and any genuine reporter knows he loses if his facts aren’t right.
    The Zogby question piqued my curiousity, and, sure enough, at interactive.zogby.com/pollregistration they invite you to sign up.  However, they refuse to accept my phone number claiming I’m not putting in 7 digits.  I know damn well how to count to 7, so I really can’t trust any of their numbers. 

    1. Zogby Interactive is a polling scheme where people are chosen from a database of people who sign up to be polled for various subjects.  Their polling results comes from a set population of people.  Even though they say they have “hundreds of thousands” of people in their database to make you feel better about their results, per state that actually reduces down to a small population in Colorado.

      Let’s say half a million in database, and the each state’s share in the database is equivalent to the population of that state.

      So CO_Pop / USA_Pop * DatabaseSize will give us the databse for Colorado

      (4,665,177/296,410,404)*500,000 = ~7900 voluntary subjects represent the entire state of Colorado to ZI.  They get 5-10% from phone polls, since the elderly and poor likely don’t respond to internet polls.  Dependent on the actual database size and deviations, it could be more or less.  The sample size is further reduced if you count that a portion of that population will not be registered to vote or not likely vote, reducing the available population further.  Probably 5000 to 6000 people.

      They poll 615-661 people each time over those same 7900 people, 12 times so far.  That is over 7200 responses – and that is the critical flaw right there.  Even if everybody answers to their polls, which they don’t, a fair amount of their “random” population has been sampled multiple times.  They have accurately determined that their database population will vote in a certain way.  They haven’t truly determined if that population is representative of the state, especially since the phone polls are only used to make up for demographics.

      Why do you think Zogby Interactive doesn’t poll Senate races in Montana or Rhode Island, even though that would actually be relevant in comparison to sampling the Texas senate race?  Their database population is even too small for them to be comfortable.

  6. What is the concern here?  A reporter writes a story and you disagree.  One of you will have a reality check in two days. 

    ColoradoPols, to me, is concerned because of your liberal bias, which, if you were honest, perculates through this site on a pretty regular basis.  Any indication of a rally from the right is unsettling.  It ought to be.  If you guys can’t win this one, the U.S. will essentially be a one party country, and it won’t be (D).

    1. Please, please, please point out to me this perceived liberal bias? You, Xenophon, seem like the kind of cat who is smart enough to see a flawed poll when there is one. If a reporter wants to go around representing a flawed poll, in spite of many polls to the contrary, that, to me, shows a lack of journalistic integrity and, get ready for this (!), conservative bias.

      If you are saying that there is a liberal bias because because the pols lampoons the beauprez campaign or the lamborn campaign then there is nothing that I can say. But lets be honest, this site is not here to equally represent both sides in the public sphere. It is here to really happenings of politics and then allow them to be discussed. If BWB did not have as many screw ups as it has had then there would not be as much cannon fodder as there currently is. You seem to smart to really believe the “liberal bias” meme that, to me, literally infects every aspect of political or news discussion. It just isnt there. If things are going the way you want them to be for your guy, tough shit. But complaining there is liberal bias is like making a Nazi analogy: argument over.

        1. a) Journalistic integrity is an interesting subject.  Kindly point out in your law books where there is a specific set of laws that define its character.  Hmmm…, mostly related to slander (for good reason). 

          b) One of the great ways to win a debate is to control the subject that is debated.  As a few others have pointed out, this is not a total Republican debacle, there are races where the incumbent R is running quite well statewide; Rick Perry in TX for example, The Arnold in CA for another.  Nationally, for over a week now some Rs have been saying that the D onslaught crested a couple of  weeks early, and their internal polls show them picking up.  Maybe true, maybe spin, but the point of ColoradoPols was to attack the messenger.  They have no way of telling whether he is correct, or they are correct, but I believe they are motivated to try to deny a Republican rally.  If one were to start, this could end up being a very different election.

          1. Walk very much apart from the RNC and GW.  I really respect Ron Paul as a straight shooter even if I disagree with a lot of his stands. 

            Arny is winning for two reasons.  One is the California  infatuation with stars; I lived there and was in constant amazement of these men and women held as gods.  The other is a poor candidate from the Dems. 

            The common denominator of these guys and most of the other Repubs doing well is that they are not hard right and not part of the Rove juggernaut – which seems to have lost its tracks lately. Tracks as in tank tracks.

    2. It is factually incorrect to argue that polls show Bob Beauprez to be closing the gap on Bill Ritter. Polls show the exact opposite, in fact. This isn’t a matter of opinion – what Paulson wrote is factually wrong.

  7. Rep. Bob Beauprez (R-Colo.): Beauprez’s poor campaign was all the more surprising for being so unexpected. The congressman was seen as a rising star within the Republican Party nationally following his back-to-back wins in the Democratic-leaning suburban Denver House district he currently represents. But he has run an uneven — at best — race for governor and trails former Denver district attorney Bill Ritter (D) badly in late polling. Beauprez was unable to match Ritter’s fundraising and made any number of costly errors. The latest? An FBI investigation into how Beauprez obtained information from a federal database that was used as a campaign hit against Ritter. Not good.

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