Hillary Clinton’s chief political strategist and pollster Mark Penn has sought to dismiss the results of the latest Zogby International poll “simply because it showed his client in a bad light,” according to Zogby.
The poll findings released Monday showed that in head-to-head match-ups, Clinton would lose to all five leading Republican presidential candidates — Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Fred Thompson, and John McCain — by a margin of at least 3 percentage points.
The same poll showed that Barack Obama would beat all five of the GOP hopefuls, and John Edwards would beat or tie them.
Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program with Joe Scarborough on Tuesday morning, Penn said:
“That was Zogby’s first interactive, online poll ever. The Gallup poll that came out also yesterday showed Senator Clinton five points ahead of Giuliani and double digits ahead of some of the other possible Republican nominees, and showed that if Barack Obama were the nominee it would be dead even.
“That’s a real poll. That’s got 50 years of history. This is the first time Zogby has done something online. It’s a meaningless poll, and really, frankly, shouldn’t even be on your show.”
Zogby’s Director of Communications Fritz Wenzel responded on Zogby’s Web site:
“Penn mischaracterized this latest online Zogby poll as our first interactive survey ever — a bizarre contention, since we have been developing and perfecting our Internet poll methodology for nearly a decade, and since Penn’s company has been quietly requesting the results of such polls from Zogby for years…
“What is interesting is that no other campaign has made as many requests for Zogby polling data over the years than Penn has made on behalf of Clinton.”
Wenzel concludes: “Because Mark Penn is a quality pollster himself, we chalk up his contention that our poll is ‘meaningless’ as a knee-jerk reaction by a campaign under pressure coming down the stretch.”
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.