After incumbent Bill Foster publicly criticized the results of a survey from St. Pete Polls commissioned by this blog as "junk science," we decided to go back in the field to confirm the current state of the St. Petersburg mayor's race.
Turns out, Bill Foster was right. He's not down six points to Rick Kriseman, as the previous poll indicated. He's down five points. I apologize for the confusion.
Kriseman leads Foster 48 to 43 percent among voters who said they intend to vote in the general election. Eight percent of voters said they were undecided.
Find out what's happening in St. Petewith free, real-time updates from Patch.
As usual, St. Pete Poll's survey was conducted by an automated phone call polling system. The results were then weighted to account for proportional differences between the respondents' demographics and the demographics of the 2013 St. Petersburg primary election voting population. The demographics used were age, gender, party, and race. Only if the respondent selected that they were definitely or probably going to vote in the upcoming election were they asked the questions in this poll.
Ten days ago, we published the results of the first post-primary poll and it showed Foster trailing Kriseman by six points among voters who had cast a ballot in the primary election. Foster described these numbers as “nonsense.”
Find out what's happening in St. Petewith free, real-time updates from Patch.
“I suggest that somebody needs to do a scientific poll as I did with a real scientific sampling,” the Mayor said. “That is an unscientific and unreliable poll.”
In an email sent last week, Foster said his internal polling shows the race deadlocked.
For the record, the sample size on this current poll was a whopping 1,466 respondents. The survey has a margin of error of just 2.6%. And just to be thorough, here is a spreadsheet with detailed anonymous data of the respondents with their responses.
Kriseman, for his part, said he was pleased but not surprised by numbers that give him a solid lead. “There is no excitement for this administration,” he said. “There are no achievements that Bill Foster can point to that are the direct results of him being mayor.”
