Yesterday the campaign of Kansas Senator Jean Schodorf released a poll that shows her in the lead in the race for the Republican Party nomination for United States Congress from the fourth district of Kansas.
The candidates 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.
The poll was conducted on July 22, before the Wichita Eagle editorial board announced its endorsement of Schodorf. It shows her with 24 percent of the vote. Pompeo is in second place with 21 percent, Hartman in third with 16 percent, and Anderson with seven percent.
The question asked of voters, according to Schodorf, is “If the election for congress were today, would you be voting for Jean Schodorf, Jim Anderson, Mike Pompeo, or Wink Hartman”? Candidate names are rotated. The poll question does not included candidate Rutschman.
The 400 poll respondents were selected from those who had voted in the last two primary elections in the fourth district. The campaign says that “This number of interviews produces survey results that are accurate at the 95% level of confidence.” No margin of error was given for this confidence level, but in a conversation with Jim Yonally of Jayhawk Consulting Services, the firm that conducted the poll, he said the sampling error was four percentage points.
That means that Schodorf’s lead of three percentage points is within the margin of sampling error.
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.
Schodorf’s three publicly-released polls could not have turned out better for the candidate. Starting low, each poll has showed her increasing her numbers, until this poll shows her in the lead.
Besides being the first poll showing Schodorf in the lead, her campaign polls have always differed from the independent polls in showing a very high number of undecided voters. Yonally said he believes that his firm’s practice of using human operators to conduct the survey produces more accurate results than do automated polling systems.
The poll also indicates Pompeo’s support increasing, while Hartman’s drops.
KWCH Television will release an independent SurveyUSA poll of the fourth district this week, I am told.
Kansas fourth Congressional district poll results