A survey asking Chicago residents to select among 10 possible contenders for mayor has White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as the clear front-runner.
The phone survey of 2,365 Chicago registered voters, conducted Wednesday night by Springfield based We Ask America Polls, had Emanuel checking in at 23.5 percent, followed by U.S. Reps. Jesse Jackson Jr. (19.5 percent) and Luis Gutierrez (14 percent) and Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart (12 percent). None of the 10 candidates in the survey have announced their candidacies. The one candidate who has declared his intention to run, City Clerk Miguel del Valle, was not included in the poll.
Gregg Durham, We Ask America’s chief operating officer, was quick to issue a slew of caveats about the survey. Although he said he had a sufficient sampling and credited the Robocall method employed for its general accuracy, he acknowledged that this specific poll was done “just for fun.”
“While the technique used is very accurate,” said Durham, “there is no way you can say this is a totally serious poll because you don’t know who is going to run.”
He said the sampling underrepresented Chicago’s Hispanic population, and noted that Emanuel did not do as well with Latino voters as Gutierrez.
“We are not putting this out as saying this is the group that is going to run,” said Durham. We Ask America has largely done private polling for the last five years, and only started recently making some of their findings public.
Has it been correct that robocalling is outlawed, apart from political and charitable needs…