The race in the 20th Congressional District up Albany way -- where Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, an insider with the Clinton crowd, is trying to take a seat away from four-term Republican John Sweeney -- has long been nasty. But now it's getting downright weird.
A Siena College poll today showed Sweeney up by 14 points. That's different from other polls, that have shown the race to be tight, or Gillibrand way ahead. And those variations, to us, were just what happens sometimes with polls. But now two normally sane bloggers from the Daily News and from the Albany Times-Union are suggesting that maybe Siena's results are tilted because of various Sweeney ties to the institution.
It's all actually kind of intriguing, and we're sure that the smart folks running Gillibrand's campaign threw up all kinds of smoke when a bad poll came up, and we have no idea whether Siena is right or wrong, and we're not in the business of critiquing other bloggers. But....
If these connections mean anything, they suggest that someone in the Siena polling operation whored themselves out to Sweeney. So -- would that be Steve Greenberg, the poll's spokesman and designer, who worked for a couple of Democratic Assembly speakers and Democratic Comptroller Carl McCall? Or would it be polling director Joe Caruso who, according to Greenberg, ran regional offices for Pat Moynihan and Hillary Clinton before joining Siena? Or just who?
"Siena has no agenda," Greenberg said this afternoon. "We stand by our methodology and we stand by this poll."