​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 headline numbers in the new Brown University poll are bad – really bad – for Congressman Cicilline and Governor Chafee. But there are other ways to analyze the results that look slightly better, though still pretty bad, for the two incumbents.

Political practitioners have long complained about “the science” of surveys that generate job approval ratings by asking voters to rate an official’s job performance as either “excellent,” “good,” “fair”/”only fair” or “poor.” Their argument is that while “only fair” isn’t a huge vote of confidence, it’s not necessarily a sign of out-and-out disapproval, either.

Evidently, Brown disagrees – the university lumps together “excellent” and “good” to create the metric it calls an approval rating. But by digging into the detailed breakdown of the poll, we can take another look at the numbers and what they say about local leaders’ standing among voters.

One way to do that is to strip out three of the four ratings and just look at the share of voters who describe each politician’s job performance as “poor,” which is clearly negative. While that probably understates the level of disapproval, perhaps Chafee (45%) and Cicilline (43%) can take solace that a majority don’t think they’re doing a poor job:

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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.”

Update #2: Here’s my analysis of why the four polls done over the last three weeks wound up with such divergent results.

Brown University’s Taubman Center just released a new poll of 565 registered voters in Rhode Island. Survey conducted Sept. 27-29; MoE plus or minus 4.1 percent. Here are some headlines:

• Caprio: 30%
• Chafee: 23%
• Robitaille: 14%
• Block: 2%
• undecided: 30%

First impression – that’s an astonishingly high number of undecided voters, and this poll’s results are closer to the infamous Profughi survey than ours or Rasmussen’s. This shows Caprio pulling away from Chafee compared with Brown’s last poll in August, which had Caprio at 28% and Chafee at 27%, a statistical tie.

Update #1: I just got off the phone with Joe Fleming, our Eyewitness News political analyst. He’s too much of a gentleman to critique his fellow pollsters’ work, but overall he said his take on the state of the campaign has not changed since last week. “I still think the governor’s race is too close to call,” he said. Brown is “showing a 7-point margin, but they’re also showing 30% undecided, which makes it really difficult to say what’s happening.”

In the 1st Congressional District, Brown polled 289 respondents, giving this part of the survey a margin of error of plus or minus 6%. Results:

• Cicilline: 39%
• Loughlin: 21%
• Raposa: 6%
• undecided: 31%

Other races:

• Lieutenant Governor: Roberts 36%, Healey 23%, Venturini 7%, undecided 34%
• Secretary of State: Mollis 39%, Taylor 28%, undecided 33%
• AG: Kilmartin 26%, Wallin 14%, McKenna 10%, Little 7%, Rainville 2%, undecided 41%
• Treasurer: Raimondo 38%, King 20%, undecided 42%

In the 2nd Congressional District, Brown polled 276 voters, so there’s an MoE of plus or minus 6.1%. They have Langevin at 47%, Zaccaria at 13%, and undecideds at 34%.