Hostettler has a chance

This evening on Brit Hume's Special Report I heard that Hostettler was behind Ellsworth by 16 points. I had a very hard time believing that so I tried to find the source of the poll.

Here it is. No wonder.

More than 47 percent of registered voters in the 8th District favored Ellsworth, while 31.8 percent favored Hostettler, according to the poll commissioned by the Evansville Courier & Press and conducted by Indiana State University's Sociology Research Lab.

More than 16 percent of those surveyed were undecided. Thomas Steiger, a professor of sociology and women's studies at Indiana State, said he was surprised by the undecided vote.

"The conventional wisdom is that a high percentage of undecided is bad news for the incumbent," he said.

The poll of 603 registered voters in the district was conducted Sept. 6-21 and has a margin of error of 4 percentage points. Of those polled, about 32 percent identified themselves as Republicans and about 33 percent said they are Democrats. About 63 percent of respondents were women.

Ed Patru, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, questioned the poll's methodology. He said the poll is flawed because it surveyed registered voters instead of likely voters, and it was conducted over several weeks instead of a few days.

"There's a reason why professional pollsters haven't been driven out of business by college kids -- good methodology typically yields more reliable findings," he said.

A previous poll found voters about evenly split between Hostettler and Ellsworth, who is sheriff of Vanderburgh County. The WISH-TV Indiana Poll was a telephone survey of 400 likely voters and was conducted Sept. 5-8 by Maryland-based Research 2000.

Ellsworth runs like a Republican, he is a pro war social conservative. He claims Hostettler sold us out to the oil companies who deliberately drove up gas prices because they are evil. or something. Hostettler just keeps talking about how Nancy Pelosi will be running things if the Democrats win. I would say it could go either way.