Last Blog On Earth

In my piece about the City Attorney race in the current issue, I mentioned a poll sponsored by the San Diego County Republican Party taken in late March, but whose results were revealed last week by Red County. After deadline had passed I had a chance to talk to John Nienstedt of Competitive Edge Research and Communications about the results.

The snapshot at the end of March looked like this: Mike Aguirre: 27 percent, Jan Goldsmith 21, Scott Peters 10, Brian Maienschein 8, Amy Lepine 3, Undecided 29.

Here are a couple of notes from our conversation.

• Nienstedt has polled this race several times already. The big news from this most recent poll is that the separation between Peters and Goldsmith grew by 4 points to 11 percent. “It’s looking more like a two horse race,” he said.
• The 29 percent who were undecided are a bit more Republican than Democratic. Since two of the Democrats (Peters and Aguirre) are higher profile than both of the Republicans (Goldsmith and Maienschein), Democrats are more likely to be decided voters.
• But the undecideds are unlikely to break for Aguirre. “Think about it,” Nienstedt said. “If you like the job Aguirre is doing, you’ve already got your guy.”
• A lot of people think Aguirre has been doing a bad job. More than half of those polled somewhat or strongly disapprove of his work. His 29 percent support might get him through June, but Nienstedt thinks he needs an opponent who also carries some baggage if he’s going to win in November.
• Both Peters and Maienschein have a lot of baggage. Neinstedt polled the two men in a way that tested the impact of being on the City Council when all the pension stuff went down, and he found it was “very damaging, very heavy duty.”

In the end, Nienstedt wanted to emphasize that this was just a snapshot of a race still in its very early stages.

“It was two months before the election,” he said. “If a week is a life time in politics, than this is still eight or nine lifetimes before June 3.”