Tag: Politics

Update: An election eve poll has been released. Click on Kansas election eve poll.

Final polls indicate a close race in the contest for the Republican Party nomination for United States Congress from the fourth district of Kansas. Two candidates, Wichita businessman Mike Pompeo and Kansas Senator Jean Schodorf, are virtually tied for the lead as the campaign enters its final few days.

The candidates for this nomination and their campaign websites are Wichita businessman Jim Anderson, Wichita businessman Wink Hartman, Wichita businessman Mike Pompeo, Latham engineer Paij Rutschman, and Kansas Senator Jean Schodorf.

Schodorf campaign poll

Candidate Jean Schodorf has released a survey that shows her, again, in the lead. The poll was conducted on behalf of the Schodorf campaign on July 29th. It shows her in the lead with 30 of the vote, with Pompeo just behind and within the margin of sampling error, at 26 percent.

Hartman is in third place with 16 percent, and Anderson follows with seven percent. As in the past, Schodorf’s polls didn’t include Rutschman. 21 percent are undecided, which is again — as it has always been with Schodorf’s polls — much higher than produced by independent polls.

The news release accompanying this canvass didn’t give many details, but Schodorf’s past polls conducted by the same consulting firm have been live operator surveys of 400 voters. Likely primary voters are selected by using voter lists.

As with all polls produced on behalf of a candidate, we need to remember that surveys produced and released by campaigns are just that, and the results would probably not be released by a campaign if the results did not portray the candidate favorably.

Kansas fourth Congressional district poll results

State of the State KS poll

State of the State KS in conjunction with Fort Hays State University and its Docking Institute of Public Affairs has released a poll of the Kansas first and fourth Congressional districts. The results for the fourth district are at State of the State KS Poll: Schodorf And Pompeo Take Lead In Campaign For Congress in Fourth District.

In the poll, Schodorf leads with 22 percent, Pompeo has 19 percent, Hartman has 13 percent, Democrat Raj Goyle as 11 percent, Anderson with six percent, and 28 percent are undecided.

This poll differs from others in that Goyle, one of the two Democratic Party candidates, was included with the Republicans in the survey question.

This survey used a smaller sample size, and as a result the margin of sampling error is larger at eight percent.

Commentary on the results of this survey by Fort Hays University Political Science Professor Chapman Rackaway concluded: “In short, Pompeo and Schodorf seem to be the two strongest candidates with Hartman struggling to keep up after a very strong opening to his campaign. Pompeo has established himself as the candidate of choice for conservatives, regardless of what issue the respondent self-identifies on. Schodorf’s lead among women and moderates has put her ahead, only slightly.”

The State of the State KS survey asked many background questions, and they may be read at State of the State KS.

Averaging the Kansas fourth district polls

Taking the last three available polls (the two described above and the KWCH/SurveyUSA poll) we find a very close race between two candidates for this nomination. Pompeo and Schodorf lead with 25 percent, with Hartman at 17 percent and Anderson at nine percent. 18 percent are undecided.

Kansas fourth Congressional district poll results averaged

KWCH Television in Wichita and SurveyUSA have released a poll of candidates seeking the Republican Party nomination for United States Congress from the fourth district of Kansas.

The survey shows support for Wichita businessman Jim Anderson and Kansas Senator Jean Schodorf on the rise, while the numbers for Wichita businessman Wink Hartman continue to decline. The support for Wichita businessman Mike Pompeo also fell slightly, well within the poll’s level of sampling error.

The numbers have Pompeo leading with 31 percent, Schodorf with 24 percent, Hartman with 23 percent, Anderson with 13 percent, and Latham engineer Paij Rutschman at two percent.

Undecided voters are at six percent. The poll was conducted July 26th through 28th. The margin of sampling error is 3.5 percent.

Interestingly, this poll has Schodorf at the same level of support as shown in her own internal poll released earlier this week. Her poll, however, showed her in first place with 24 percent support, with Pompeo in second place at 21 percent. That difference is within the poll’s sampling error.

The Schodorf poll had 32 percent of voters as undecided, which is — and has been the case with all of Schodorf’s surveys — several times higher than the six percent undecided measured by SurveyUSA.

State of the State KS is working on a poll that should be released today or tomorrow. This will provide another independent measure of voter sentiment as election day — August 3rd — draws near.

Some voters have already voted. At yesterday’s meeting of the Sedgwick County Commission, Election Commissioner Bill Gale said that about 13,000 mail ballots have been sent to voters, with about half being returned already.

In the 2008 primary election, 36,724 ballots were cast in Sedgwick County. With 6,500 ballots already returned, this means that at least 17 percent of voters (assuming the same turnout as in 2008) have already voted.

For the fourth Kansas Congressional district, about 71 percent of the population is in Sedgwick County.

On the Democratic Party side of this race, it appears that the television advertisements appearing for Raj Goyle are working. He trailed in the last poll two weeks ago, but now leads opponent Robert Tillman 63 percent to 19 percent, with 18 percent undecided. Two weeks ago Tillman led Goyle 40 percent to 36 percent.

Kansas fourth Congressional district poll results

Candidates for the Republican Party nomination for United States Congress from the fourth district of Kansas have filed campaign finance reports for the first two weeks of July and some last-minute reports since then.

The reports show Wichita businessman Wink Hartman continuing to self-finance his campaign, with $0 in outside contributions collected in July. His campaign continues to spend at a rapid pace.

The candidates for this nomination and their campaign websites are Wichita businessman Jim Anderson, Wichita businessman Wink Hartman, Wichita businessman Mike Pompeo, Latham engineer Paij Rutschman, and Kansas Senator Jean Schodorf.

Here is a summary of FEC campaign finance reports for the first part of July 2010:

Kansas Fourth District Republican campaign finance reports,
July 1, 2010 through July 14, 2010

               Anderson  Hartman   Pompeo  Schodorf
Contributions    2,060         0   49,347    14,891
Candidate loans      0   289,537        0         0
Expenditures     2,240   427,872  207,830    23,172
Cash balance     4,049    40,958  286,032     8,823

Figures for Rutschman were not available at the FEC data site.

Figures that stand out in this report include zero dollars raised by the Hartman campaign from individual contributions. All money raised during this period came from the candidate himself.

Also, Hartman spent more than twice as much as the second-largest spender.

Pompeo has, by far, the largest cash balance as of July 14. Normally this would be a positive factor as the campaign proceeds to election day. Hartman’s smaller cash balance, however, has little of the normal meaning associated with it, as the candidate makes frequent contributions to his campaign as funds are required. This is characteristic of self-financed campaigns.

From the start of the election cycle through July 14, 2010, the numbers look like this:

Kansas Fourth District Republican campaign finance reports,
through July 14, 2010

              Anderson   Hartman   Pompeo Rutschman Schodorf
Contributions  38,924    141,949  935,087       80   50,338
Candidate loans 3,275  1,563,137        0   30,000   29,006
Expenditures   37,301  1,664,129  649,054   24,464   70,521

(Rutschman’s figures are through June 30, 2010)

In this table we see the largely self-financed Hartman campaign outspending all other candidates. His campaign has spent more than twice as much as all other campaigns together.

This still isn’t the entire story, as candidates are filing “48 hour notice” reports of last-minute contributions (expenditures are not included in these filings). Through July 28, 2010, here are the numbers:

           Anderson   Hartman  Pompeo
Total        5,100    348,500  35,700

(Schodorf and Rutschman have not filed any of these reports.)

In the case of Hartman, the total of $348,500 is all from the candidate himself. Overall, the Hartman campaign has raised $2,053,586, with 93 percent from candidate self-financing.

According to OpenSecrets.org, a project of the Center for Responsive Politics, the average amount spent by winning candidates in 2008 for the U.S. House of Representatives was $1,372,591. Hartman is well over this figure.

Each House district has roughly the same population, although the cost of running campaigns varies widely due to the differing characteristics of districts.

Self-financed candidates

As the Kansas fourth district has one candidate who is self-financed, let’s take a look at self-financed candidates and their characteristics.

In writing about political scientist Jennifer A. Steen and her book, Self-Financed Candidates in Congressional Elections (University of Michigan Press, 2006), Bruce Bartlett wrote this:

One of her findings is that the necessity of asking people for contributions is valuable to a candidate, especially inexperienced ones. She thinks this is mainly because self-financing keeps bad candidates from being weeded out of contention by a lack of contributions. But I think it also results because once people have given someone a campaign contribution they become invested in that candidate and are more willing to vote for him or her on Election Day and to work on his or her behalf.

Voters also resent candidates who appear to be trying to buy an election. Self-financed candidates may be independent of special interests, but they also often appear aloof from the concerns of average voters. Having to ask people for money forces a candidate to take their feedback, thus learning about their concerns directly rather than filtered through pollsters and consultants.

In her book, Steen writes: “They [self-financers] are also less likely to engage in what Richard Feuno calls ‘two-way’ campaigning, or interaction between the candidate and constituency, which thus entails some degree of learning and responsiveness on the candidates part.”

Perhaps as a result, self-financed candidates don’t have a very good track record of winning elections. Steen found that for competitive U.S. House of Representative districts, candidates who are “extreme self-financers” (Hartman falls in this category) won 37 percent of primary election contests. That winning percentage falls to 31 percent in general elections.

Voters are interested in what type of representative a candidate would make. Do self-financed candidates differ from other candidates once in office? Steen writes: “These differences do not recommend self-financers as representatives. They are quite unlike the vast majority of citizens, even citizens in more affluent districts, and they are less likely than non-self-financers to confront and engage the citizens they seek to represent.”

Self-financed candidates usually claim that since they have a source of campaign funds independent from the usual sources — which these candidates usually describe as “corrupt” or undesirable in some other sinister way — they can act in the best interests of all their constituents once in office. But Steen found differently: “However, once elected most self-financers assimilate very rapidly to the norms of fund-raising — only a small percentage continue to resist the charms of campaign contributors.”

Kansas fourth Congressional district campaign finance

The claims made last week in a campaign advertisement by Wichita businessman Wink Hartman remain elusive and largely unproven.

Hartman is running for the Republican Party nomination for United States Congress from the fourth district of Kansas. The other candidates and their campaign websites are Wichita businessman Jim Anderson, Wichita businessman Mike Pompeo, Latham engineer Paij Rutschman, and Kansas Senator Jean Schodorf.

Scott Paradise, the Hartman campaign manager, will not accommodate my request to view the documents that he says prove the allegations in the ad.

Paradise said he is “not happy” with some things I’ve written about Hartman. I don’t imagine he is, as I’ve written several articles critical of Hartman. But I offered to go to the campaign office and look at the documents and hear what the campaign had to say.

What voters are left with is a last-minute inflammatory charge made by Hartman against Pompeo without having evidence of the charges. We know this is true because the campaign wasn’t able to produce evidence immediately and had to wait for the accuser to supply documents. That evidence, when examined by two Wichita Eagle reporters, appeared to indicate that Thayer Aerospace, Pompeo’s company, made “late, and in some cases reduced, payments” to one of its suppliers.

The accuser says the company didn’t pay and drove him out of business and into bankruptcy. There’s a lot of distance between these two claims.

We also know that the Hartman campaign ran the ad without identifying the businessman, perhaps hoping that no one would be able to identify him and investigate his claims.

Florida issue miscast

At issue also has been Hartman’s residency. Critics say that by claiming a “homestead” property tax exemption on a home he owns in Florida, Hartman became a Florida — not Kansas — resident.

There’s also been discussion as to whether he filed income taxes as a Kansas or Florida resident. Hartman says he’s paid all his taxes in Kansas.

But voting is something over which there is no controversy. As first reported on this site, Hartman most recently voted in Florida. Both he and his wife voted in Florida’s general election and presidential preference primary election in 2008.

They didn’t register to vote in Kansas until July of last year.

Voting by mail is popular in Sedgwick County, with 36 percent of the ballots cast in the November 2008 general election cast by mail. It doesn’t cost anything more than a postage stamp and the desire to cast your vote where you feel your political home is.