Documents disprove Rell’s timeline on polling
By Ted Mann, New London Day
Published on 10/13/2009
Hartford - Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s account
of when her administration abandoned a
plan to use public funds to poll voters on
budget issues is directly contradicted by
correspondence between officials at the
University of Connecticut.
UConn officials were approached as recently
as late January by professor and pollster Ken
Dautrich about performing a voter poll to
test Rell’s proposed budget cuts with voters,
according to copies of the correspondence
obtained Tuesday by The Day through an
ongoing public records request.
Dautrich sought to survey 500 state residents
to “gather their views of the state budget
situation and opinions about how the
problem should be solved,” according to
an e-mail exchange dated Jan. 21 between
Amy Donahue, the head of the university’s
Department of Public Policy, where Dautrich
is based, and Jeremy Teitelbaum, the dean of
the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
That is well after Rell has insisted her top
aides rejected the idea of doing a poll with
public funds, and more than one month after
a publicly funded focus group on budget
and political questions that has landed the
Republican governor in political hot water.
Dautrich, the former director of UConn’s
Center for Survey Research and Analysis,
asked UConn officials if the center could
conduct a poll of voters on the budget late
in January after leading the focus group for
Rell.
In an e-mail message obtained by The Day
under open-records laws, Donahue wrote
to Teitelbaum to report that “one of our
faculty members has been approached by
the Governor’s office to conduct a statewide
survey of 500 Connecticut adults to gather
their views of the state budget situation and
opinions about how the problem should be
solved.”
The faculty member, Donahue says later in
the same message, was Dautrich, and the
project was to be “funded through the Office
of Personnel Management as an addition to
an existing contract, and we would obtain
appropriate approvals for this addition
through OSP,” an apparent reference to the
university’s Office of Sponsored Programs,
which approves faculty work for external
clients.
Teitelbaum forwarded the message to the
interim director of the Center for Survey
Research and Analysis, the polling center
Dautrich once ran but which was already in
the process of being shut down, after several
years of controversy, including an ethics
investigation into Dautrich’s work for the
Center.
The poll was apparently not conducted
by the university, and Rell, Dautrich and
administration spokesmen have been adamant
that no formal polling, apart from the focus
group, was ever conducted with public funds.
The UConn exchange about Dautrich’s
polling plans occurred just two days after
Moody, Dautrich and Rell special assistant
Matthew Fritz met at a diner in Vernon for
what Moody said would be a “talk about
polling budget messages, specific cuts, etc.”
But Rell’s spokesman and the governor
herself have repeatedly insisted that wasn’t
a reference to polling at all, but instead to
discuss the previously collected findings of
their focus group from Dec. 16. On Tuesday,
Rell spokesman Rich Harris refused to clarify
the governor’s position on the meaning of
Moody’s message and the “timeline” she
offered Friday about the administration’s
consideration of doing a voter poll.
“In light of the ongoing investigation,
which the Governor welcomes, we are not
commenting,” Harris wrote in an e-mail
message.
In simultaneously defending and downplaying
the public opinion-gathering portion of
Dautrich’s work, which had been a closely
guarded secret in the Rell administration,
the governor last week insisted that doing
a poll had been Dautrich’s idea, and that it
was quickly rejected by her staff, including
M. Lisa Moody, her chief of staff and most
powerful aide.
“There was a proposal to do a poll and that
came from Ken Dautrich,” Rell said. “We
never agreed to that, never said we wanted to
do a poll, in fact said we’re not going to do a
poll.”
When a reporter followed up with a question
about e-mails between Moody and Dautrich
from late January in which they discussed
“poll-testing” the messages to be included in
Rell’s budget speech as well as “specific cuts”
she would propose, the governor said the
two were simply being imprecise, and were
talking only about the results of the focus
group conducted in December.
“Polling was the focus group,” Rell said. “I
say often times that I want to poll the General
Assembly and see what they’re going to say.
I don’t run a particular poll. I ask questions,
and I believe that’s what it was intended to
mean.”
Rell has refused to reveal details of the poll
conducted later in the spring by her political
exploratory committee, other than to say
that it included questions about tax policy.
Dautrich has acknowledged giving advice on
both the questionnaire for that poll and its
results without being paid by the committee.
That service is the subject of a state elections
complaint filed Tuesday by a Democratic
political consultant.
Dautrich is working under a contract with the
governor’s chief budget agency, the Office of
Policy and Management, and has been tasked
with identifying tactics to streamline state
government and improve efficiency.
But a review of public records and
correspondence has shown that he also
repeatedly commingled policy guidance and
political advice for the governor, advising
Rell’s chief of staff on drafts of her speeches,
tipping the governor’s office off to potential
maneuvers by the legislature’s Democratic
majority caucuses, and helping to gauge the
most and least popular strategies for closing
the state’s $8.7 billion budget deficit.