News-Record.com

The latest Elon Poll finds that voters are aware of Speaker Jim Black’s ethical problems, but that might not be a deciding factor in the election. (Click here for the poll release and data).

(If you need it: click here for more on the Speaker.)

I think a lot of folks looked at the poll data yesterday and got excited. Half of all people were aware of the Speaker’s problems and that seemed like a lot.

But remember, the data in this poll was gather at the same time as those for Friday’s release. So having a little more than 50 percent of all people be aware of the Black issue (and 25 percent of all respondents saying they’d vote on it) isn’t that strong compared with 70-plus respondents talking about economic, health, immigration and security issues.

What may point to the Speaker’s issues being more of a potent force is that those who are aware of the ongoing saga are more likely to be active voters. So, you could make an argument that the folks who didn’t know about the saga (or the 60 percent of those surveyed who know about black but who didn’t know whether their representative supported Black or not) aren’t the most likely folks to be showing up to the polls.

I suspect the biggest impact of this whole deal may be that it motivates an extra clump of Republicans to show up to the polls. The question is, are any of the state House or Senate races tight enough where those extra few voters are going to make a difference.

Again, like with the first bolus of data from the poll, it may be the unaffiliated voters who are the most interesting.

They were aware of the Black issue in equal numbers to Republican and Democratic voters and were more likely to ad their own “derogatory comment” when first asked about the Black scandal.

So if you believe that some portion of independent voters is truly undecided, and those voters show up to the polls, then maybe that’s where you find another effect from Black’s problems. Perhaps if given a choice between two candidates they don’t recognize, they’ll be more likely to go Republican than Democrat due to the influence of the story. But again, the question becomes whether that group is big enough to make a difference.