Establishment Democrats rip new Firedoglake polls – The lowdown

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Frustrated by a series of polls detailing the electoral jeopardy faced by a handful of House Democrats, the party establishment in Washington is pushing back against liberal blogger Jane Hamsher, whose prominent blog Firedoglake commissioned the surveys.

This month, at the request of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz issued a memo slamming the design and composition of the Hamsher-commissioned polls, which reported that four vulnerable House Democrats were in serious trouble.

In late January, a prominent Democratic polling firm, Global Strategy Group — which has conducted extensive work for the DCCC — put out its own memo questioning the accuracy of the automated polling firm, SurveyUSA, that produced the results.

Establishment Democrats, including the incumbents who were the subject of the polls and party committee charged with reelecting them, have sharply criticized the SurveyUSA polls.

“Let me just say that with respect to those polls, they are totally off,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told POLITICO. “We had the opportunity to compare those polls with polls that have been done in a professional manner, [and] the others are very different. So they’re not credible.”