Recently, a poll that JMC Enterprises of Louisiana conducted on the behalf of the Baton Rouge TEA Party received some editorial commentary from the editor of the Baton Rouge Business Report. In this column, the editor notes that “…Now the Tea Party says it has a “poll” by some JMC Enterprises, which I have never heard of and which supposedly used land line phones to call. [Who even answers a land line phone these days, with caller I.D. and cell phones?] The voters have already spoken…”

Our perspective was not sought before this column was published, so we will discuss the particulars of this poll below:  

(1)   JMC Enterprises, at the request of the BR TEA Party, did a three question survey;

(2)   In the survey, approximately 10,000 households in East Baton Rouge Parish were called, and there were 826 responses to at least one of the three poll questions;

(3)   To ensure that the survey was representative of the opinion of East Baton Rouge Parish voters, we made sure that the demographics of the survey population reflected the racial breakdown the “valid” voters of the parish;

(4)   JMC Enterprises of Louisiana defines a “valid” voter as someone who has voted at least once since the 2008 Presidential election – in that race, 72% of East Baton Rouge Parish voters participated. Non voters and those who did not cast a ballot in that election were excluded from our survey population;

(5)   Poll respondents showed little enthusiasm for demolishing/building a new downtown library, and this lack of enthusiasm was apparent across all demographic groups;

(6)   This same survey also showed over 50% approval ratings for both the job performance of Mayor-President “Kip” Holden and for the TEA Party’s efforts to increase public awareness of local government.

A copy of the poll write up (which contains the poll results/crosstabs) is here: