For our first Arkansas Times Insiders Poll, we asked politicians, lobbyists, journalists, bloggers and other politicos their opinions on some of the most pressing political questions of the day. It’s an attempt to dissect the conventional wisdom on all things political, straight from the minds of those in-the-know. The partisan split of our participants, at least by our accounting, is practically right down the middle. There were only two more respondents from the Left than the Right and eight independents.
Some of the survey’s most interesting findings: the Tea Party‘s influence is on the decline, Mark Darr is emerging as a Republican star and, at least according to one of our Insiders, Rep. Loy Mauch is a contender for the Republican gubernatorial nomination (but then again, someone else suggested Mickey Mouse). For the questions on who will win the next governor’s race and each party’s nomination, respondents wrote in whoever they liked. The answers were not limited in any way. So for the governor’s race, we only included the top three vote-getters in the results. As you can probably tell from the picture, Dustin McDaniel was the big winner, receiving the most votes for “Who will be our next governor?” To see all the results. look at our latest “Big Picture” feature.
Participants were invited to participate through Survey Monkey via email. They were told their individual responses would remain anonymous, but their names would be included as participants. This is a feature we hope to build on in the future. We would like to give a very special “Thank You” to all who took the time to answer our questions.