California polling and California spinning

Despite Mickey Kaus’ latest Schwarzenegger scoop, it looks like the Teutonic Terminator has succeeded in phase one of his campaign — with Peter Ueberroth’s withdrawal, Schwarzenegger is now the only viable Republican challenger [What about Tom Mclintock?–ed. According to Daniel Weintraub, he’s irrelevant]. Now comes the latest poll from Knowledge Networks:

The new poll of 528 likely and registered voters was conducted August 29th to September 8th and shows Californians favoring the recall of the Governor by 62% to 38% (with a margin of error of +/- 4.3 percentage points). Evidencing a strong split along party lines, 91% of Republicans — compared to 42% of Democrats — favor recalling the Governor. Among the replacement candidates, the survey found that Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger has a commanding lead over his main rival, Democratic Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante, by a margin of 40% to 28%. Only 3% of Republicans indicated that they will vote for Bustamante; but 19% of Democrats said they would vote for Schwarzenegger…. The Stanford/Knowledge Networks survey is the first to ask voters to choose from the same list of 135 candidates that they will see on election day. Previous polls have restricted voters’ choices to the top candidates and have allowed respondents to select “undecided” or similar options.

Click here for the full results. There is one jaw-dropping statistic that is not mentioned in the press release: among Hispanic voters, Bustamante only beats Schwarzenegger 40% to 37%. Since this is well within the poll’s margin of error, so Bustamante and Schwarzenegger are in a statistical dead heat for the Hispanic vote. This would be consistent with the Field poll data as well. Many bloggers, myself included, believed that unless Schawrzenegger started getting specific on policy proposals, he’d wither on the vine. However, since Cruz Bustamante has decided to match Schwarzenegger’s vagueness, that pressure has yet to kick in. One last point about this poll. The only reason I know about it (and apparently beat Kaus, Robert Tagorda and Daniel Weintraub to posting about it) was because someone at the White House Writers Group e-mailed the press release to me. [Does that mean the White House is getting involved?–ed. No, WHWG is a private consulting firm unaffiliated with the government. Do they have a political slant?–ed. The group was founded by Reagan-Bush speechwriters, and perusing the staff bios it’s safe to say they lean to the right. By posting about this, aren’t you, like, their willing slave?–ed. This is worthy of blogging because of the caliber of the people who ran the survey, and the fact that their survey method mirrors the actual voting process. That’s the spin in the two media stories I found on the poll, both of which are less than two hours old] Two lessons to draw. The first is that the White House Writers Group is smart enough to know how to get favorable information out there — distribute it to members of the blogosphere!! Second, the Schwarzenegger canpaign may be short on specifics, but they’re long on quality consultants. UPDATE: Eugene Volokh got the same e-mail.