Carr defends internal poll, won’t supply crosstabs
Former state Rep. Joe Carr (R-Lascassas) is objecting to questions The Tennessee Journal raised in this week’s print edition about an internal poll conducted on behalf of his campaign for Rutherford County mayor.
We observed pollster Triton had included a line about 180 of 455 respondents from a list supplied by the client, with the remainder coming from the company’s own voter file (an unusual arrangement, according to other campaign consultants we consulted). We then noted that despite being the source of the list that generated 180 responses, only 144 out of the total sample backed Carr in the survey.
Carr says it’s unfair for us to have said his list was “handpicked,” saying he merely forwarded the entire Rutherford County voter database created by the local administrator of elections.
Triton told us its clients sometimes provide a list of contacts to invite to respond to its internal polls.
“To assess possible differences in the client list versus the standard voter file we obtain, we breakout the results on crosstabs so the results can be compared between the two list sources,” a company official told us in an email earlier this week. “That is the purpose for the variable you are seeing in the topline results. Take a look at the crosstabs and you can review the differences between the list sources.”
Update: A company official confirms it received the Rutherford County voter file from Carr and used Republican-leaning individuals in its automated survey.
So we asked Carr to supply the crosstabs to show how many of the 180 respondents from the sample he supplied backed his bid compared with the responses from the remaining 275 people from the company’s voter file.
He declined.
“Your attempt to get the crosstabs to review the methodology appears to be nothing more than a ruse,” Carr wrote in an email.
Carr campaign update: Candidate responds to HR complaints
Former Rep. Joe Carr in a lengthy Facebook post is defending himself about a series of human resources complaints filed against him when he worked in state government. Carr blames ‘liberal big government bureaucrats’ at the agency that has been run by Republican administrations since 2011.
“It’s been less than 10 hours since I announced I’m running for Rutherford Co. Mayor and already I’m getting phone calls about claims of ‘harassment’ while serving at TDEC as Assistant Commissioner,” Carr writes in the post. “Liberal big government bureaucrats just don’t sleep, do they?”
Carr denies he was pushed out of his job over the complaints.
“If anyone tries to claim that I was forced out of the administration over this, I have no problem releasing the tapes proving otherwise,” he writes. “I left on great terms, was in fact asked to stay, and told to come back anytime.”
Read the whole thing below:
He’s back! Joe Carr making another run for political office
Former state Rep. Joe Carr (R-Lascassas) is taking another stab at running for public office. This time it’s for Rutherford County mayor, where incumbent Bill Ketron may be vulnerable after legal problems related to his former insurance business and a $135,000 civil penalty he received for numerous campaign finance violations.
Since leaving the General Assembly, Carr has unsuccessfully run for two different U.S. House seats, the U.S Senate, state Republican Party chair, and the state Senate. He was hired to work in Gov. Bill Lee’s administration after endorsing the Republican during the 2018 gubernatorial primary, but left after about a year. Carr was also a prominent backer of Manny Sethi’s U.S. Senate bid last year. The latter lost to now-Sen. Bill Hagerty of Nashville in the Republican primary.
