​By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – More than half of Rhode Island voters support allowing same-sex marriage in the state, while most opponents of the idea say it conflicts with their religious beliefs, according to a new poll released Thursday by Brown University.

The poll also found Gov. Lincoln Chafee’s approval rating is a dismal 26%. ”Lincoln Chafee still has not been able to move his numbers after over two years as governor,” WPRI 12 political analyst Joe Fleming said.

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The 1st Congressional District race looks headed for a photo finish: this week’s WPRI 12 poll shows Democrat David Cicilline at 43% and Republican Brendan Doherty at 42%, with 8% of voters still undecided.

So who are those 8%?

“With the undecided voters, there’s no one group where they’re from,” said WPRI 12 political analyst and pollster Joe Fleming after the two of us examined the data from our Oct. 24-27 survey of 300 likely voters. (The margin of error is plus or minus 5.66 points, and larger for subgroups, so caveat emptor.)

One characteristic that does stick out: 11% of women are undecided, compared with only 6% of men. “That could be good for Cicilline because he’s winning that group,” Fleming said. On the other hand, by definition these are women who haven’t been convinced by the Democrat’s pitch so far.

Other than that, the undecideds are a highly heterogeneous group.

Between 8% and 9% of voters in each of the poll’s three age groups – young voters (18 to 39), middle-aged voters (40 to 59) and older voters (60 or older) – are undecided. The group includes 8% of independents, 8% of Democrats and 4% of Republicans.

These Rhode Islanders may be more hesitant than the average citizen to make up their minds: 18% of voters who haven’t decided between Obama and Romney for president also haven’t decided who to support for Congress, compared with only 9% Obama voters and just 4% of Romney voters.

Both side will be spending the final days of the campaign trying to present a message that pushes these voters in one direction or the other – and hope that, if the undecideds break heavily in one direction, they can make up for it with a solid ground game.

• Related: Poll: Cicilline clings to 1-point lead over Doherty (Oct. 30)

The new WPRI 12 poll in the 1st Congressional District’s Democratic primary we’re releasing at 6 p.m. surveyed precisely 302 likely Democratic primary voters. You might think that means our esteemed longtime pollster, Joe Fleming, made 302 phone calls to get his results.

But it took many more calls than that to get a representative sample of the district’s voters – more than 5,000 calls when all was said and done, according to Fleming. “You need the right age groups,” he said. “At the end of it, you may be asking for a male or somebody who’s 18 to 39″ – that is, the people hardest to track down.

That’s important because any poll’s results are only as reliable as the people who took the survey. It’s especially tricky with a primary, where only about 25% of registered voters turn out to the polls, he said.

Luckily for us, nobody in Rhode Island has more experience getting polls right than Joe Fleming. He’s been with WPRI 12 since 1984, and still recalls making waves with bygone surveys such as one that put DiPrete and Sundlun in a dead heat.

I’m betting the results dropping at 6 p.m. will cause a similar stir when we release it on TV and online.

• Related: Exclusive WPRI 12 Poll: GOP’s Doherty has big lead over Cicilline (Feb. 27)

Congressman David Cicilline is expecting to face Republican Brendan Doherty in the November election – but he’ll never get the chance if businessman Anthony Gemma snatches the Democratic nomination from him in September’s primary. So what are the chances of that actually happening?

We’ll have the answer Wednesday when we release the results of an exclusive new WPRI 12 poll. Democratic primary voters in the 1st Congressional District weighed in on whether they plan to vote for Cicilline or Gemma, how they feel about the two candidates, which one is more electable and how Cicilline’s apology tour is going.

Tim White and I will have the complete poll results online and on air Wednesday at 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. The survey of 302 likely Democratic primary voters in the 1st District was conducted last Tuesday through Saturday by our pollster, Fleming & Associates, and its margin of error is 5.7 percentage points.

• Related: Exclusive WPRI 12 Poll: GOP’s Doherty has big lead over Cicilline (Feb. 27)

Education Commissioner Deborah Gist has plenty of fans in Rhode Island, but few rank-and-file teachers are among them if a new poll commissioned by the state’s teachers unions is accurate.

Just 16% of public school teachers in Rhode Island had a favorable view of Gist’s job performance in January while 82% had a negative view, according to a survey of 401 teachers conducted by Fleming & Associates for the National Education Association Rhode Island and the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals.

The commissioner was particularly unpopular with long-tenured teachers. Those with 20 years or more experience in the classroom gave Gist a favorable rating of only 9%, significantly below the 23% favorable rating she received from teachers with less than 10 years of experience. (Fleming also conducts polling for WPRI 12.)

The two unions did not provide the full survey results but said its margin of error was plus or minus 4 points. It emerged less than a week after NEARI’s Delegate Assembly unanimously passed a resolution calling on Gist to delay the full implementation of the state’s new teacher evaluation system.

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By Ted Nesi and Tim White

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Rhode Islanders of every stripe are unhappy with Gov. Lincoln Chafee’s performance as he settles into his second year in office, according to an exclusive WPRI 12 poll released Monday evening.

The new survey of 500 registered voters finds just 21% of voters give a positive grade to Chafee, an independent ex-Republican, while 75% give him negative marks. That includes nearly half of voters – 48% – who rate the job Chafee is doing as “poor.”

The widespread antipathy toward Chafee is a stark contrast with how Rhode Islanders view Treasurer Gina Raimondo. The survey shows 56% of voters give Raimondo a positive review.

The poll also finds U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has a 22-point advantage over his challenger Barry Hinckley, with the Democratic getting 50%, the Republican getting 28% and 20% of voters unsure.

Read the rest of this story »

• Interactive: Complete results from the WPRI 12 poll with cross-tabs

Coming on Tuesday: Should Providence file for bankruptcy? Should Rhode Island allow casinos?

By Ted Nesi and Tim White

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Congressman David Cicilline is headed for a double-digit defeat at the hands of Republican Brendan Doherty unless he finds a way to win back a large number of voters by November, according to an exclusive WPRI 12 poll released Monday evening.

The new survey of 250 registered voters in Rhode Island’s 1st Congressional District shows Doherty, a former state police superintendent, would defeat Cicilline 49% to 34%, with 16% of voters undecided. Doherty’s lead over Cicilline has grown by two points since the previous WPRI 12 poll last May.

Cicilline has “moved the needle, but unfortunately for him in the wrong direction,” WPRI 12 political analyst Joe Fleming said. “Clearly, whatever he’s tried to turn it around hasn’t worked to this point.”

Read the rest of this story »

• Interactive: Complete results from the WPRI 12 poll with cross-tabs

Coming up at 10: Whitehouse-Hinckley; approval ratings (Obama, Chafee, Reed, Whitehouse, Raimondo)

I asked Benenson Strategy Group to send me the demographic breakdown for the 450 likely voters who were interviewed for Engage Rhode Island’s pension poll so I could get WPRI 12 political analyst (and pollster) Joe Fleming’s take on whether the Washington-based firm captured the local voting population accurately.

“They look good,” Fleming told me in an email after giving the screening questions a look, though he said the number of union households and college graduates surveyed might be a little high.

Pensions aside, the most interesting statistics to me in the demographic breakdown were the questions about where the 450 likely voters surveyed get their Rhode Island political and government news.

The top online source was local broadcast TV news websites like WPRI.com at 29%, followed by none (28%), local newspapers sites like Projo.com or national news sites (tied at 26%), or search-engine portals like Google News and Yahoo! News (17%).

The top source in general for political and government news was television (37%), newspapers or magazines (27%), followed by the Internet and radio (tied at 14%). That mirrors the findings of national studies by the Pew Research Center.

You can check out the demographics for yourself by downloading the PDF from WPRI.com.

Count Jennifer Duffy and Joe Fleming among those impressed by Brendan Doherty’s first fundraising report.

“For a first-time candidate who only started raising money in early April, he did a tremendous job,” Cook Political Report’s Duffy told me, pointing out that Doherty’s $300,000 haul is almost 40% of the total money John Loughlin had during the last cycle.

“He’s got to keep it up – there’s no resting on your laurels here – but he proved himself to be a contender,” she said. ”What this will do now is open doors elsewhere.”

David Cicilline’s $360,000 total was “a good number,” and the incumbent Democrat is unlikely to ever lack for funds partly because of the support he receives from the gay community, Duffy said. “But he has a serious, financially viable challenger,” she said.

As for Loughlin, Duffy said his $3,000 total raises further questions about how much his campaign will be hampered by his absence from the country while serving in Iraq. Doherty may also pick up key endorsements in the coming months that could help help him win the Republican nomination, she said.

WPRI 12 political analyst Fleming echoed Duffy, calling the second quarter “an excellent start for Brendan Doherty” that will increase the pressure on Cicilline and Loughlin. “It sends a message,” he said.

“The question is going to be what Brendan Doherty does in the next quarter,” he said. “Can he keep the momentum up? He’s raised a lot, but can he keep that going as time goes on? That’s going to be one of the keys.”

On the Democratic side, Fleming described the quarter as “a good start” for Cicilline. “I think he’ll have the money, there’s no question,” he said. A big question there is whether other Democrats will jump into the race – they could wait as long as the end of the year and still be viable, he said.

Overall, the second quarter money chase “shows that CD1 is going to be a very expensive campaign in 2012,” Fleming said. “I think it’s going to be over $1 million for each person.”

Congressman David Cicilline’s job approval numbers in the 1st Congressional District are much worse than those of his fellow Democrats, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and President Obama.

But there may be a silver lining for Cicilline in our new WPRI 12 poll – he’ll be sharing the ballot with Obama and Whitehouse in November 2012, so their presence on the ticket could give him a needed boost.

The survey of 300 registered voters by Fleming & Associates was conducted May 13-15 and has a 5.7% margin of error. Here’s how they rated the job performance of the three Democrats:

• Obama: 53% positive / 46% negative / 1% don’t know
• Whitehouse: 46% positive / 47% negative / 7% don’t know
• Cicilline: 23% positive / 63% negative / 14% don’t know

In our survey, “positive” means a voter described the politician’s job performance as “excellent” or “good,” while negative means he or she described it as “fair” or “poor.”

Tim White and I have more – including extended analysis from our political analyst Joe Fleming – in our new story on WPRI.com. Joe will also be taking about the poll this weekend on WPRI 12′s “Newsmakers” along with Tim, WRNI’s Ian Donnis and Scott MacKay, and yours truly.

You can also see the poll results for Cicilline when he goes head-to-head against his two potential Republican opponents here, and check out complete poll results here.

The results are in, and they’re not pretty for Congressman Cicilline.

Cicilline would lose to his two potential Republican challengers – Brendan Doherty and John Loughlin – by double-digits if the 1st Congressional District election were held today, according to the new WPRI 12 poll being released on air right now.

The survey of 300 registered voters by Fleming & Associates was conducted May 13-15 and has a 5.7% margin of error. Here are the head-to-head matchups:

• Loughlin: 47%
• Cicilline: 35%
• undecided: 17%

• Doherty: 46%
• Cicilline: 33%
• undecided: 20%

We also got favorability ratings – as opposed to job performance ratings – for each of the three. “I’ve seen surveys where people had very high favorability ratings and very low job ratings – they like them as a person but they don’t necessarily like the job they’re doing,” our analyst Joe Fleming said.

Here’s how those broke down:

• Cicilline: 33% positive / 57% negative / 10% don’t know
• Loughlin: 38% positive / 16% negative / 46% don’t know
• Doherty: 43% positive / 5% negative / 52% don’t know

Tim White and I have much more – including reactions from Cicilline, Doherty and Loughlin’s spokesman – in our complete story on WPRI.com.

At 10 p.m. on Fox Providence and 11 p.m. on WPRI 12, we’ll have more results from the poll – this time testing how Cicilline’s standing in the 1st District compares with Sheldon Whitehouse’s and Barack Obama’s. You can look through complete poll results here. (No Nightcap tonight.)

It’s the political question of the year in Rhode Island – just how much damage has Providence’s financial crisis done to Congressman David Cicilline’s standing with his constituents?

WPRI 12 will bring you the answer this Thursday when we publish the results of an exclusive poll taken last weekend. Voters weighed in on how they feel about Cicilline’s job performance so far, whether they plan to vote for him or one of his two Republican challengers, and whom they blame for the capital city’s fiscal mess.

Tim White and I will have the complete poll results online and on air Thursday at 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. The survey of 300 registered voters in the 1st District was conducted by our estimable pollster Fleming & Associates of Cumberland, and its margin of error is 5.7 percentage points.

The good news for Sheldon Whitehouse in the new Public Policy Polling survey is that his job approval rating continues to rise. The bad news is that he’s too close for comfort to the crucial 50% mark against potential challengers.

Those were the headlines out of the poll for Eyewitness News political analyst Joe Fleming when I spoke with him about it earlier today.

“Anytime an incumbent’s below 50%, you’ve got to be concerned with that person’s reelection – and we know from past WPRI surveys Sheldon has had some bad job performance ratings,” Fleming said. “However, they seem to be going up, and this poll shows it going up. So it seems like Whitehouse is heading in the right direction, from a low point.”

“It’s not great, but it’s not the end of the world for him,” he added.

The poll will also give pause to former Gov. Donald Carcieri as he considers whether to jump into the race. His disapproval rating stands at 49% almost two months after he left office. Carcieri would also face some of the same liabilities as an incumbent, since memories of his eight years as governor will be fresh in voters’ minds.

If you’re Carcieri, “you’ve got higher negatives than the guy you’re challenging,” Fleming said. “I don’t see him running again, but you never know in politics.”

Then there’s Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian. Whitehouse’s support was lowest – 47% – against Avedisian than in any other head-to-head matchup in the PPP survey. But is he too moderate – and too close to Lincoln Chafee – to be the Republican nominee?

“The Republicans have to decide what they want,” Fleming said. “If they want this seat, letting Avedisian have a free run at it would be a smart move; putting up a primary opponent would not be, because he may decide, I’m not going to run if I have a Republican primary.”

“The Republicans and Avedisian have to make peace in some way,” Fleming said. “He could be a strong candidate.”

The poll shows a solid block of 35% or so of voters who will vote for any candidate other than Whitehouse, so any challenger has “got to find another 15%. And you might say, 15% – it’s not a lot – but it’s a lot,” Fleming said.

Money will be a key factor. Whitehouse is ramping up his fundraising – he had $723,000 on hand as of Dec. 31 – whereas his potential opponents haven’t even begun to tap donors, though Carcieri could put some of his own cash into a campaign. Either way, Fleming thinks any potential Whitehouse challengers will need to be in position by early August to have a solid shot.

Whitehouse could also benefit next year from being a Democrat running in Rhode Island in a presidential election year, with Barack Obama at the top of the ticket – particularly since the state’s Republicans failed to capitalize last November in what was otherwise a banner year for the G.O.P. nationally.

“It could be an interesting race, but it’s still very early,” Fleming said. “We’ve seen polls that show a race is going to be very interesting early on, but then it all depends on who runs and how much money they raise.”

Oh, and what about Buddy Cianci? Fleming doesn’t see him running for elected office again. Politically, he said, “the question is how high Buddy can go” – that is, there may be a ceiling to his support. Fleming recalled how Joseph Garrahy crushed Cianci back in the 1980 race for governor, his last statewide bid.

I asked our Eyewitness News political analyst Joe Fleming what he thought about Gov. Carcieri’s suggestion that Rhode Island should consider adopting runoff elections after Lincoln Chafee won the governor’s office with only 36% of the vote.

“I believe this election was the exception,” Fleming told me in an e-mail. “In most years, a third candidate would only get about 5% of the vote. I do not see this happening very often. … You very seldom get three candidates that all can draw a large number of votes.”

And, he added, “I do not think the General Assembly would be in favor of such an idea.”

You can catch Tim White’s report with Carcieri’s thoughts on runoffs and a potential Senate bid in 2012 during tonight’s 6 p.m. newscast.

To the obvious delight of Dave Scharfenberg and myself, over the last three weeks there have been four separate polls conducted on the Rhode Island governor’s race: Rasmussen, WJAR/Quest, WPRI/Fleming and now Brown University. Here’s an updated version of the chart I posted last week showing how the top three candidates fared, as well as the percentage of undecideds, in the surveys:

Except in Democrat Frank Caprio’s case – he consistently wins about a third of voters – these polls are all over the map, with a 10-point spread between the highest and lower results for both independent Lincoln Chafee and John Robitaille, the Republican.

And when it comes to undecided voters, the divergence is even starker – Brown found a whopping 30% of voters haven’t mind up their minds, whereas Rasmussen said just 9% haven’t.

Anything’s possible, but it’s hard to believe the share of undecided voters more than tripled in the week and a half between those two surveys. Digging in a little deeper, one factor I see is that in both Rasmussen’s and our own WPRI/Fleming poll, more effort was made to probe whether self-described undecideds actually had a preferred candidate.

Marion Orr

Marion Orr, who oversees the Brown poll, told me most of the calls for his poll were made by Brown students trained and paid for their work, although sometimes he supplements them with outsiders. Orr also said they are specifically dissuaded from probing voters further.

“They’re trained not to sway the respondents,” he told me. “If they say they’re undecided, that’s what we put them down for.”

Brown’s methodology often leads to a high undecided figure – the Taubman Center had 19% of Rhode Islanders undecided between Obama and McCain two months before the last presidential election [pdf].

The problem there is that winding up with such a large share of undecided voters can limit what the poll tells us. It’s fine if those voters are truly undecided – but as the other poll results showed, it’s possible that further questioning could find a large number of them leaning one way or another, which is what we really want to know. Indeed, Victor Profughi, who did the controversial WJAR/Quest poll, told me last week he regretted not doing more to see whether undecided voters were actually leaning one way or another.

Another question is, who are we polling?

Brown surveyed 565 registered voters, while the other three polls all talked with likely voters, defined different ways. Although Rhode Island has around 700,000 registered voters, only about half of them are expected to show up at the polls next month – and what we really want to know is which way the half that votes is leaning. That’s why Joe Fleming limits our WPRI polls to likely voters as we get close to an election.

For the record, Orr said he did screen his respondents to see which ones were likely to vote, but he wound up deciding to release the results for registered voters instead. “We wanted to include a broader sample,” he said.

“People are still making up their minds,” Orr added. “It’s still a close race, in the sense that there are so many people who are undecided.” About half of those undecided voters uncovered by the Brown poll described themselves as independents, he noted. “I suspect these last few weeks will be decisive.”

With September coming to a close today, Rhode Island’s polling drought has definitely come to an end. This month saw the release of three new surveys gauging the state of the gubernatorial race, with one each from Rasmussen (taken Sept. 16), WJAR/Quest Research (Sept. 15-17) [pdf] and WPRI pollster Joe Fleming (Sept. 22-26).

Of the three, the most controversial proved to be the WJAR/Quest poll done by retired RIC professor Victor Profughi, which gave Democrat Frank Caprio a huge 12-point lead over independent Lincoln Chafee. By contrast, the two men were separated by just three points in both Rasmussen’s and our poll – well within the margin of error. (In fact, the Rasmussen and WPRI polls both had the two at 33%-30%, with Chafee ahead in theirs and Caprio on top in ours.)

Here’s a comparison of how Caprio, Chafee and Republican John Robitaille fared in the three polls, along with the percentage of undecided voters:

As Profughi pointed out to me in an e-mail, all three polls tell the same story about Frank Caprio’s support being in the 30%-35% range. But there is a nine-point spread between Profughi’s and Rasmussen’s results for Chafee, 10 points for Robitaille, and a whopping 14 points for the share of voters undecided.

Our WPRI poll by Joe Fleming is much closer to Rasmussen’s results, and campaign aides told us it largely matched their internal surveys. One notable difference in the samples: Profughi’s was only 12% Republicans, compared with 17% in ours, and 50% independents, versus 39% in ours. (All this is a reminder of why the way a poll is conducted makes such a difference.)

In retrospect, Profughi told me he should have pushed harder to see if self-identified undecided voters were actually leaning toward one candidate or another. “[W]e didn’t do nearly enough to break those who told us they were undecided first time out,” he said.

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Tim White and Joe Fleming talk polling

Tomorrow is a big day around here, as we release the findings from our third Eyewitness News poll of the year. We asked Rhode Islanders what they think about every hot topic – the governor’s race, Cicilline vs. Loughlin, President Obama’s job performance, the 38 Studios and Deepwater Wind deals, the Bush tax cuts, and more.

Tim White and I have been digging through the findings with our pollster, Eyewitness News political analyst Joe Fleming, and although I can’t put out any numbers yet – under threat of death from the powerful Jay Howell – take it from me that this is one meaty poll, with a host of interesting findings.

I’ll have a preview with the results of one question tomorrow morning, and then Tim will have the results for statewide races and issues in the evening at 6 p.m. and 11 p.m., with federal races and topics following Thursday at 6 and 11. (I have my eye on tomorrow at 11, when we’ll find out how voters feel about the 38 Studios deal.)

In the meantime, here’s some background on how a survey like this gets done.

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