Stick with me, this will take a sec.

One of the revelations of reading thru all the Nick Mackey Affair documents up on the NCDP site is the understanding that the Democratic Party in Mecklenburg County is a complete mess. Combine this with the weak candidates it has offered up for mayor and Pat McCrory has not had serious, consistent political opposition for years. Now that he has stepped into the statewide arena, however, that has changed.

The stunts and gaffes that once only drew the attention of a committed few here in Charlotte are now news across the state. Witness the zing McCrory suffered yesterday from pollster Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling. Jensen’s latest poll shows that McCrory has slipped since the last PPP poll and now trails Democrat Richard Moore in a head-to-head match up he previous led.

Jensen notes that this news evidently did not go over well in the McCrory camp. The reason is, as we’ve documented, McCrory basically has to compete with Moore for the same donor base. We’ll let Jensen pick it up from there:

Anyway, the McCrory camp clearly wasn’t happy about this. So someone named PackPat1 wrote a comment on the Under the Dome blog saying that our poll was clearly biased because we did not survey an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. Someone else, I’m guessing another McCrory supporter, chimed in to agree.

Their comments indicate a complete lack of knowledge about polling. Here was my response:

Packpat1 and Alterac evidently know virtually nothing about polling.

Polls are weighted to reflect the partisan distribution of the sample that is being polled. More people in North Carolina identify themselves as Democrats than Republicans, particularly in the current political climate, so more people we poll identify themselves as Democrats. Our distribution was 47-38 in this poll. In the poll that the right leaning Civitas Institute released today, the party distribution was even more Democratic – 49-38.

By your logic that we should have polled an equal number of Democrats and Republicans to be ‘fair’ then when people poll a heavily Republican state like South Carolina or a heavily Democratic state like Massachusetts you would get incredibly inaccurate results. When you do a poll your sample needs to reflect the political leanings of the state’s voters to the greatest extent possible.

Also, Packpat 1, a simple google search reveals that you are the nephew of one of the candidates for Governor. I think if you are going to shill for him here you should be transparent about that.

When someone attacks us, I want to know who it is. So I googled packpat1 and quickly found out his real name is Patrick Sebastian.

Gold star Meck Deckers will recall Packpat 1 from this blog last August, at which time I speculated McCrory had an enthusiastic nephew or cousin at work on boards and blogs. Jensen details some other Packpat1 activity the past few months and concludes this is not a good sign.

Anyway, after seeing my response PackPat1 deleted his comment about our poll. Or maybe the hacker got in and deleted it, who knows. But that’s why I wanted to get this information out here. It’s just more sloppiness on the part of McCrory campaign to send a family member whose identity is easily traceable to attack all bad news for him on blogs — especially when their posts show them to be quite ignorant as in this case.

A McCrory campaign has never had to answer this sort of criticism before, unless you count the Stan Campbell-mismanaged 2001 arena vote which somehow insulted the entire city while spending ungodly sums of money. The bumbling campaign template is now set for McCrory in 2008 and reporters, editors, and commentators will be more than happy to use it to generate stories.

Either McCrory breaks that template with substance and execution — or hobbles around the state with it.

Bonus Observation: Bob Orr says Jensen’s polls are flawed and biased. Jensen responds no they ain’t.