Latest poll numbers for Camejo

["Jose G. Perez" <jg_perez@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The latest Field poll, which was done mostly before Arianna's
withdrawal, shows Camejo with 6% of the vote, including those of
Arianna's supporters who named him as their second preference.

That's the highest he's ever hit on that poll (the Field poll) in this
race or the 2002 one. The only answers that were counted were limited to
those who said they had already voted or would vote for sure, and didn't
include those who said they would probably vote.

A peculiar thing -- unlike previous Field polls, unless my memory is
playing tricks on me, there was no demographic breakout for Camejo,
although they did have it for the other three major candidates remaining
in the race. How meaningful that breakout would have been in Camejo's
case is doubtful. Given the small sample sizes involved, those numbers
are very unreliable -- for example of the 800+ people surveyed, actually
only 120 or so were Latinos; the size of the Black sample was about half
that. 

The pollsters make a point of saying that most of Camejo's voters would
have Bustamante as a second choice. This may seem odd (given that
Arianna was still in the running when most of the polling was done) but
that is what is reported. And remember despite Ariana's tremendous
advantage in name recognition and much more free TV time (interviews on
CNN's Larry King show, for example), her support went steadily down as
the campaign progressed whereas Camejo's increased, and by the time she
withdrew from the race, she had actually hit 0% support (technically,
less than 1/2 of 1%) in the LA Times poll.

The Field poll very clearly reflects the positive impact of Camejo's
campaign, and especially his participation in the debates. Whereas only
6% of those Field polled early in August described themselves as having
a favorable impression of Peter (and 23% negative), the most recent part
of the latest poll (it was carried out in two parts, before and after
the big debate) shows a 24% "favorable" rating, and his "unfavorable"
rating even declined a bit, to 38% from 41%.

Overall, the picture that emerges from this and other polls is that both
Davis's and Bustamante's support is collapsing. Both the field poll and
a separate poll of Hispanic voters done with much larger sample size
show he has less than half of the Latinos backing him. In recent
elections Latinos have backed the Democrat standard bearers by 2-1, 3-1
and even 4-1 margins. Bustamante's "unfavorable" ratings have gone up
past 50% and his favorable impression rating, which was never high, is
down to 34%.

Frankly, the posture of the Democrats in this election is untenable.
Bustamante's position is that Davis should stay as governor and that's
why you should vote for Bustamante to replace Davis. It make no sense.

Moreover, I think Davis has done himself even further damage with his
last-minute switches on various issues, like drivers' licenses. He
stabbed the Latino community in the back on this, and now turns around
and with a gun to his head in desperation signs the bill. And the
community is supposed to trust him? What happens next Wednesday morning
if he wins, when he no longer has a gun pointed to his head? And like
this stunt he has pulled a number of others.

The other side of this is that the corporate media have relentlessly and
shamelessly been pimping for Schwarzenegger, and have left him
completely off the hook on everything from his family's Nazi heritage to
his association with racist, anti-immigrant outfits. 
There is no pretense that even the "major major" candidates are being
covered equitably, and that was true even when Schwarzenegger was
trailing in the polls. 

Some people attribute this to "competitive pressure" from Fox news and
so on. I don't believe that is the case. The plain fact is media outlets
are controlled by corporations run by Republicans: freedom of the press
belongs to those who own one. 

And in this case, the influence of Spanish-language media has to be
taken into account. That's overwhelmingly Univision. And guess who
controls Univision? Venevision -- the Cisneros family, the same people
that tried to overthrow President Chávez is Venezuela a year and a half
ago.

José


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