6 Downtown News
January 31, 2011
Twitter/DowntownNews photo by Gary Leonard
Poll Position When It Comes to Bruising Questions in the 14th District Election, What Matters Is Not Who You Ask, But How You Ask by Jon RegaRdie executive editoR
I
n the five weeks remaining until the March 8 election, voters in the 14th District may be repeatedly hit with three messages from the campaign of challenger Rudy Martinez: THE REGARDIE REPORT
1) Martinez is the greatest American hero since Obamaman, having saved an entire family from a burning car while the rest of the huddled masses sat and watched, doing nothing. It’s a bird! It’s a politician! It’s SuperRudy! 2) Incumbent José Huizar is just a shade shy of Beelzebub, with a propensity for using taxpayer money for his own benefit and for a Grinch-like pilfering of thousands of dollars from poor angelic nonprofits. 3) One of the most pressing issues in the district is the need for more ducks in public parks, and SuperRudy is the one to make that happen. I hold these thingamajigs to be self-evident, because on Tuesday, Jan. 25, I spent about 20 minutes on the phone answering questions, many of them incredibly leading, for a pollster working for the Martinez campaign (I live in the district, and, lucky me, got a call). While
the questioner never said he was part of Team Martinez — he only identified himself as with the firm California Opinion Research — the 19 zillion queries about Rudy as a guy who created hundreds of jobs, and the fiercely negative Huizar questions (more on those later), made it clear who the queries will ultimately benefit. Actually, everything wasn’t crystal clear at first. The questioner sounded bored and uninformed. He started by asking if I would vote and then whether I had a positive, negative, neutral or no opinion of the two candidates, the City Council, former 14th District rep Nick Pacheco and “Major” Antonio Villaraigosa. Major? I know dealing with L.A.’s economy and media masses is grueling, but I didn’t realize AnVil had advanced beyond lieutenant. Ask and Ye Shall Receive When it comes to campaigns, polls with leading questions are de rigueur. You generally pay a firm a lot of money to provide whatever answers you hope to spin in a press release, while using the rest of the results to determine what to include in hit piece mailers. Huizar was the first one to strike with a poll. Over five days in late December, 400 district voters answered questions, leading to a Jan. 4 press release giving Huizar a 58%-15% lead over Martinez, with 27% of voters un-
A new poll for CD14 challenger Rudy Martinez (standing) asks some pretty harsh questions about Councilman José Huizar (seated). Pollsters were calling around the district last week.
decided. It ranked Huizar high in a number of demographic categories and basically said people love him as much as they do puppies and the movie Babe. Then again, he’s paying a Santa Monica polling firm $28,500 (according to campaign disclosure statements filed with the City Ethics Commission — and couldn’t he find someone in the city of Los Angeles for the job?), meaning he got what he paid for, or paid for what he got, whichever way you want to put it. Some anti-Martinez stories also smack of polling. So far Huizar’s campaign has dribbled out that Martinez has been arrested four times
and lobbied for the tobacco industry. The trips to the pokey are a couple decades old and the lobbying gig is what some call making a living, but getting busted by the cops and shilling for Big Tobacco poll terribly. The new Martinez poll points to directions the race may go. Early on, the questioner asked what issue I think has the highest priority in the district. Because I’m occasionally a wiseacre (others might use a stronger word), I answered, “More ducks in public parks!” I can only hope six dozen other people said the same thing, so that when Team Martinez continued on next page
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