Brad Schneider Claims Big Lead In IL-10 Dem Race, But the Real Story is In the Comments (UPDATED)

The Patch reports on a poll conducted by IL-10 Dem hopeful Brad Schneider, who has been carpet-bombing Dem mailboxes in the 10th District to build up name recognition.

Well, okay, it wasn't really the Patch who "reported" on it, but simply republished a Schneider news pump, which is easy enough to do. In fact, someone at the Patch got ruffled enough at the many accusations in the comments to the article about biased reporting, that it had to point out that it wasn't really a news article, but simply a dump of a presser from Schneider. To be fair, Patch allows this from just about anyone, on both sides of the aisle (including, for example, some by the Bob Dold campaign), but maybe they might want to rethink this policy since they seem to be getting tarnished by folks who assume that since the post is on their website, these kind of posting are somehow 'real' journalism.

Anyway, the Schneider polls claims the following results:

29% - Brad Schneider
14% - Ilya Sheyman
4% - John Tree
2% - Vivek Bavda

However, as many commentors (most of whom appear to be campaign sock puppets from one camp or another), that means that 51% are still undecided, a month out from the election, and after more than 10 mailings by Schneider.

You really need to read the comments on the Patch site (over 50 the last time I checked) to get a laugh out of the proxy knife fight among the supporters of the various candidates. Note that Tree was at a lowly 4%, but Ellen is still in there swinging for him.

I wouldn't get overly excited about this particular poll, since as far as I can tell, no information about margin of error, sample size, etc., was released. So, in other words, no telling how good this info is. And, as the commentors point out, Sheyman has yet to hit the mailboxes in the way Schneider has, so Schneider may have already hit his ceiling, leaving Sheyman no where to go but up.

UPDATE: An alert commentor quickly directed us to Lynn Sweet, whose blog had the information we were looking for, along with a memo from the pollster giving more detailed info: The poll was a telephone survey conducted among 400 likely Democratic primary voters in the new 10th Congressional District of Illinois. Interviews were conducted February 14-15, 2012. The sampling error for this survey is plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.

400 voters is not a ton, and 4.9% margin of error is on the high side, but I guess we'll wait and see to determine how reflective these numbers are of the Dem primary voters.