Let me start with the caveat that I think polling is a distraction from the important issues in any election, as is the obsession with the horse-race as the candidates surge and falter. In this election in particular, I think our very democracy is being called into question as media institutions using the public’s airwaves are deciding for their listeners, viewers, and readers just which candidates are worthy of hearing out. And they’re making some very anti-democratic decisions.

There’s also one polling institution, Rasmussen Reports, which has consistently approached this year’s gubernatorial race with an oddly biased lens. Since credible polling should be objective by definition, Rasmussen’s sweeping of Green-Rainbow Party candidate Jill Stein under the rug is, by all considerations, quite odd. If I was after an accurate read of how Massachusetts voters were likely to vote in November, I would, well, include all ballot-qualified candidates in my phone interviews. Why Scott Rasmussen would exclude and thereby undercut a capable, articulate, and thoughtful Green Party candidate is a question that can only be answered with speculation, or by Rasmussen himself. Some have called him a Republican pollster, but Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has ranked him quite favorably in his pollster-induced error ratings (he fares better than Suffolk University, for example), and he is not listed as a Republican pollster.

Boston public radio station WBUR entered the debate this week over whether or not ballot-qualified candidate Dr. Jill Stein was worthy for inclusion in the gubernatorial debates.

In Controversy Grows Over Excluding ‘Outsider’ Candidates From Debates, WBUR features this nails-on-chalkboard quote from its own big-d Democratic political analyst, Dan Payne:

Because Jill Stein will get one quarter of the time and camera and she has not a million-to-one chance to become governor. For her to be given a seat at the table is unfair to the voters, who will then have to wade through the clutter of a fourth candidate in the race.

My question to WBUR: care to hire me as your Green-Rainbow Party political analyst? Who the hell appointed him as a guardian and protector of “the voters”?

From the Stein for Governor campaign:

The 9-member Boston media consortium sent a letter to Jill Stein today telling her that they intended to exclude her from their upcoming televised debates.  The letter, signed by Jen Peter of the Boston Globe, said that “Jill Stein does not meet the criteria for participation”.

Upon being informed of the letter, Stein responded “The people of this Commonwealth deserve to hear about how badly the Beacon Hill establishment has failed them under both Democratic and Republican governors.  They deserve to hear from the one candidate who isn’t taking money from the lobbyists or from the favor-seeking CEO’s.  They deserve to hear from the one candidate who is advocating for secure jobs across the Commonwealth – not just low wage casino jobs in three communities – for universal health care, for comprehensive fair tax reform and for ending the wars that consume 10 million Massachusetts federal tax dollars each day.  These badly needed solutions will assuredly be ignored in the debates if we let the three establishment candidates crowd me off the stage.”  

As the dust settled on the first televised debate for this year’s gubernatorial contest in Massachusetts, one clear truth emerged. There was one candidate, and only one, who could legitimately be called “the people’s candidate.”

While Scott Brown positioned himself as the people’s candidate in his January special election victory, a late surge of campaign cash and get-out-the-vote efforts from Wall Street executives and lobbyists and other special interests surely put his campaign over the top. Capitalizing on the Democratic Party machine’s condescending sense of entitlement to the late Senator Kennedy’s seat, Brown asserted that it was “the people’s seat”, and rode his truck right into the leadership vacuum that the Democratic Party has helped to create. But Brown’s slick posturing does not make for genuine leadership. And as economic and ecological meltdown continues, that leadership vacuum continues to grow.

Enter Jill Stein. Mother, medical doctor, public health advocate, climate activist, and community leader. As the Green-Rainbow candidate for governor, Stein is running the kind of campaign that is easily marginalized and sidetracked. In this two-party political system, voters and pundits alike don’t know what to make of third-party political upstarts like the Libertarian Party and the Green Party (the Green-Rainbow Party is the Massachusetts affiliate of the Green Party of the U.S.). Even in Massachusetts, where 50% of registered voters are registered unenrolled, i.e. independent, there is a tendency to write off third-party candidates as a wasted or spoiled vote.