SurveyUSA’s July initiative polling is just issue polling: WA voters weren’t shown the official ballot titles

By Andrew Villeneuve

This year, Washington voters will be tasked with deciding the fate of four initiatives backed by the Republican Party that seek to repeal or sabotage climate, affordability, health, and education focused laws recently passed by the Democratic majorities in the state Legislature. Those measures — I‑2066, I‑2109, I‑2117, I‑2124 — are part of an even larger slate of initiatives mostly financed by multimillionaire Republican donor Brian Heywood and sponsored by State Party Chair Jim Walsh, with significant financial assistance from the likes of the Building Industry Association of Washington.

Although voters won’t see any of these four measures on their August 6th Top Two ballots, the WA Poll consortium — consisting of The Seattle Times, KING5, and the University of Washington’s Center for Informed Public, and nonpartisan pollster SurveyUSA — decided to look ahead to the general election and gauge how voters feel about the initiatives. Sadly, because they indefensibly chose not to test the official ballot titles that voters will see, they ended up doing issue polling rather than initiative polling, and their survey consequently returned a flawed dataset that doesn’t tell us much. 

Read more at The Cascadia Advocate