Yet another statewide survey shows big trouble
for Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
The Glengariff Group’s poll of 600
registered Illinois voters found Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka
leading Blagojevich 33 percent to 31 percent. The poll was taken
June 2-4, after the legislative session ended and the governor had
received his first positive media coverage in months. Of the people
who were questioned, 38 percent identified themselves as Democrats,
29 percent said that they were Republicans, and 27 percent said
that they were independents.
The Glengariff Group is based in Chicago but
has done a lot of work in Michigan. The political questions were
added to a statewide survey for a client, “more for my own
curiosity than anything,” says pollster Richard Czuba. He
stresses that the poll was not commissioned by any campaign.
The poll also surveyed likely Democratic
primary voters and discovered that Attorney General Lisa Madigan is
tied with Blagojevich 31-31, with 21 percent undecided. This is the
first time that a pollster has released details of a Democratic
primary head-to-head, but the margin of error is so high —
6.5 percent — that the results are not exactly solid. Madigan
is not expected to run, despite all of the rumors to the contrary.
She just had a baby and is young enough that she can wait for a
relatively clear shot at the Democratic primary.
The survey of Republican primary voters had an
even higher margin of error — 7.4 percent — but it
showed Topinka leading the field with 18 percent. Dairy magnate Jim
Oberweis was in second place at 15 percent, U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood was at 9 percent, state Sen.
Steve Rauschenberger was at 3 percent, and Ron Gidwitz was trailing the
pack with 1 percent.
The pollster didn’t pit any other GOP
candidate against Blagojevich, which has the Topinka campaign a bit
upset. They strongly believe that crossover Democratic voters and
Democrat-leaning independents are the key to winning the general
election and maintain that the other GOP candidates wouldn’t
have fared as well head to head with Blagojevich.
A spokesman for Rauschenberger had a different
take.
“The polls right now are almost strictly
a reflection of name ID, something that tends to even out over the
life of a campaign, at least among principal contenders,”
wrote Dan Proft, a Rauschenberger advisor, in an e-mail.
Proft contends that a score of just 18 percent
for Topinka, “a 30-year GOP office holder with 75 percent
hard name ID,” leaving her in a “statistical dead
heat” with Oberweis, “a guy who has made a name for
himself by stepping all over himself in two statewide runs,”
is “not particularly compelling.”
Proft also claimed that Topinka’s strong
head-to-head results against Blagojevich are merely a function of
the governor’s own lousy numbers.
Proft makes some good points, but
Rauschenberger just ran a statewide race for U.S. Senate last year,
coming in third in the Republican primary.
Despite all that effort, a score of just 3
percent in the governor’s primary race is far from
“compelling.”
But let’s take Proft’s side for a
moment and look at the governor’s numbers by themselves,
ignoring the Topinka results.
The governor scored just 51 percent in Chicago
— a Democratic bastion. He should be at 75 percent, at least.
Suburban Cook County, which has trended more and more Democratic
for years, also had bad news. The governor was winning just 37
percent there.
Just 20 percent supported Blagojevich in the
suburban “collar counties,” which is a pitiful result.
Only 27 percent backed him in southern Illinois. And a paltry 17
percent of central-Illinois residents said that they’d vote
for the governor.
The governor’s campaign claims that he
has raised at least $14 million for his re-election campaign.
He’ll need a lot more to turn these numbers around.
This article appears in Jun 23-29, 2005.
