The Editorial Board of the Gem State Patriot decided to do this poll for the 2018 gubernatorial race because of a poll published by the Idaho Freedom Foundation taken Feb. 6 – 8. While we have enormous respect for the Idaho Freedom Foundation, we felt their poll presented a slanted result because of the narrow sampling of 400 likely Republican voters.
We believe that a poll to give a true picture of how voters feel should be a random and offer voters not only anonymity but also the choice of all potential candidates and an opportunity to choose ‘none of the above.’
We had some critics complain that internet polls are illegitimate, but as we learned from the presidential race, when people can vote anonymously they tend to vote as if they were truly at the polls. This was shown time and time again when anonymous polls were done in the presidential race Trump would do extremely well and when the voters were known he would do terribly. Internet polls also are much more random in their sampling of potential voters and they don’t tie the participant to a particular party but instead give them a full list of choices as if it were a real election. It is our belief that the populist movement which started with Brexit and then Trump will continue to propagate itself in elections for the next couple of years and therefore will influence our 2018 gubernatorial contest.
To win in Idaho, we believe that a candidate will have to draw voters from across the aisles in both independent and democratic camps if they are to win. We also believe that this race will be about the message, not the money they spend. Again if we look back to the presidential election Trump spent nowhere near the amount of money that Hillary did but he had a message that the people heard loud and clear “Drain the Swamp”. We have a huge swamp in our State Capital and it needs to be drained. After 12 Years of Butch, Little and Bedke we have our own Okefenokee Swamp right here in downtown Boise. Who is the best candidate to drain it? We will find out over the next 19 months.
We realize no poll is 100% accurate, but we believe that we have a good sampling of conservative voters since our readers are, for the most part, conservatives. We also protected the vote count by allowing only one vote per IP address so there could be no gaming even if a person had 3 different computers they would all have the same IP address and be allowed only 1 vote.
Special thanks to our Webmaster Parrish Miller for putting this poll together.
Here are the results of the Idaho Freedom Foundation poll with 400 likely Republican Voters:
Raul Labrador 39% | Brad Little 27% | Russ Fulcher 7% | Tom Ahlquist 2%
Here are the results from the Gem State Patriot Random Internet poll of 525 readers:
Russ Fulcher 51.24% | Raul Labrador 22.67% | Tom Ahlquist 15.24% | Brad Little 7.81% | Lawrence Wasden .76% | Tom Minton – Democrat .19% | Other / Undecided 2.1%
