Last week, I wrote about John Oxendine’s poll numbers and how he is fighting just to maintain his base.
I also reported – correctly – that he lied about the numbers in the latest (at the time) poll. He had said 33%, yet the actual report said 31% – and I had screen shots to prove it.
The Ox campaign continued to spread that 33% number this week via twitter and emails, and finally I got rather sick of it and called Tim Echols, Ox’s campaign manager about it. Like I said in the aftermath of ‘Constable-gate‘, Echols seems to be a genuinely good guy based on my experience with him so far, and this blatant spreading of lies just didn’t jibe with what I thought of him.
It turns out, my faith in Echols in particular was not wrong, and this was actually an honest mistake from a third party.
When I asked Echols about this, he said that the numbers the campaign were citing were in the report they actually saw, and that apparently, Rasmussen had changed the report between the time the campaign wrote the email in question and I received the email and looked at the original report on Rasmussen’s website, where I got my screenshots.
The Ox campaign printed a hardcopy of the original report, and Echols was kind enough to provide that to me via email after scanning it in as a PDF file. You can see it for yourself here.
As you can see in the PDF file, the summary box in the upper right corner says “31%” for John Oxendine even here – but the actual text of the article contains exactly what the Ox campaign quoted, namely “33% support” and “20 point lead”.
In other words, it was an honest mistake, apparently on the part of Rasmussen and not in any way the fault of the Oxendine campaign. In fact, the Ox campaign was being perfectly honest using the information it had in front of it at the time.
The campaign has fixed the statement on their website as of yesterday morning.
One last note: It is certainly easily doable to fake the above document, and you don’t even have to know that much about computers to do it. That said, Echols hasn’t given me a reason not to trust him yet, so I am taking him at his word that this is the original document that they saw. Just wanted to put it on the record that it could be a fake, though I highly doubt it at this point – just to cover my own tail in case evidence ever comes out in this matter that it was faked.
So again, this was an honest mistake on the part of Rasmussen Reports and no fault of the John Oxendine for Governor campaign – which was being honest based on the information it had in front of it at the time.
The SUMMARY says one thing (31%) and the TEXT says another (33%). My guess is they saw the summary number and chose to use the text number because it was to their benefit to do so. They knew from the jump if they were ever called on it, a great excuse was sitting there waiting for them on a silver platter.
You may give them a pass, but I certainly won’t. This is BS and nothing but BS.
Right on Debra! Lets remember, it was John Oxendine who said he didnt know who the people were that gave him over 100,000 dollars. When he got caught, he did return the money, but come on, does anyone really believe that BS? Any candidate with half a brain and any morals at all would have known where that money came from. What a big fat liar! The puddle of slease around this man is getting deeper and deeper. The fact they would fudge their numbers should surprise noone!
Don’t think that Jeff is giving Oxendine a pass by any means. However, in this case it looks like it was just a mistake in Jeff’s opinion.
It’s possible that since the text said 33% and the summary said 31%, they figure the summary was wrong. Now, I’m quite sure others were sure that the summary may have been right, and said nothing because 33% looked better, but we’ll never know for sure.
Besides, there’s plenty of other stuff to get Ox on. By the end of the election process, I’m willing to bet that we won’t even remember this one because of all the other Oxendine stuff we’ll have that’s more fresh in our memories.