I'm not visiting Marquette Law School Professor Charles Franklin's press guy, so it's not my job to defend the guy full, or even part-time. But I just wanted to point out a major league fallacy being pushed by a number of big-name liberal bloggers out there in the state trying to discredit his recent poll on potential recall match-ups against Gov. Scott Walker.
First, there's former Feingold press flack Jud Lounsbury over at "Uppity Wisconsin."
Charles Franklin, who was widely criticized in 2010 for tweeking his poll results to fit the wishes of the rightwing group WPRI, has released another stinker.
Then there's "The Chief," who is actually defending Franklin's polling and methodology in his post.
Perhaps the silliest attack is that Franklin is himself a conservative, and thus has a motive to skew his polls as such, based solely on two pieces of evidence: he conducted the poll for Marquette Law School (an institution so conservative that it employs noted reactionary Russ Feingold) and that he once conducted a poll for WPRI. If this were true, then Franklin would also be a flaming liberal because he sold Pollster.com, of which he was a co-founder, to the Huffington Post. He can't be both.
But perhaps the piece de resistance comes from failed Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate, and the man who gave us the 1982 NFL Players Strike, Ed Garvey over at "Fighting Bob.com."
Whose poll is it if it is not Marquette's? Did JS ask or are they part of the deal? Recall we have been flashing the yellow caution light about UW-Madison's Pol Sci prof Charles Franklin. He was part of the UW-Madison partnership with extreme right-wing Bradley Foundation's WPRI. Bradley would pay Franklin and his fellow poli sci profs and Franklin would lend the UW's good name to polls. WPRI would give final approval to the wording, timing, subject matter and they agreed to spin results with MJS! In fact, MJS would get the information ahead of all other media. Tsk, tsk, and whoa Nelly. Who conducted this "new Marquette poll"? Why none other than Dr. Franklin: this is the first of a series being conducted by Charles Franklin, co-founder of pollster.com and a visiting professor at Marquette on leave from UW-Madison. Because he is on leave, he will argue that neither he nor Marquette are covered by the Open Records law that tripped him when the WPRI deal was exposed by FightingBob.com.
Ed, do yourself a favor and don't trust your memory. Trust your archives.
It wasn't Charles Franklin who was on retainer with WPRI for "the failed polling" as they put it. It was his colleague Prof. Ken Goldstein.
Here's how Pollster.com's co-founder and former Democratic pollster Mark Blumenthal explained it in a posting on March 9, 2010:
The AP story -- which is well worth reading in full -- includes complete details plus a reaction from [UW Political Science Professor] Goldstein who says he is "stunned, flabbergasted, amazed -- every single adjective you can come up with" as the criticism he has received.
Our own interests in this story are as follows: Pollster.com co-creator and contributor Charles Franklin is a member of the UW-Madison political science department and a friend and colleague of Goldstein but, he tells me, was not personally involved in the WPRI polling. Also, well before the WPRI polling project, my assistant Emily Swanson worked for Goldstein as an undergraduate at UW-Madison.
If nothing else, this episode demonstrates the increasing difficulty consumers of polling data have in identifying potential conflicts in the sponsorship and funding of public polling. Simply identifying polls sponsored by a political campaign or political action committee or conducted by a campaign pollster -- something we try to do on Pollster.com -- is obviously not enough. In this case, a University of Wisconsin news release billed WPRI as a "non-partisan, non-profit think tank [that] has been conducting independent, annual polls on politics and issues for more than 20 years." Yet the Institute acknowledged to AP what their report characterized as a "free-market, limited government slant and receives funding from the Bradley Foundation, a Milwaukee group that supports numerous conservative causes."
Not sure what I'm proud of in this blog post. That I continued to prove Ed Garvey's lost most of his marbles, or that there are at least two other liberal bloggers in Wisconsin still willing to take what he writes, run with it sight unseen and fail to fact-check it for themselves?