PHOENIX, July 10 - Speaking to reporters at Sky Harbor Airport as he was about to board a JetBlue flight to New York for a fundraising dinner, Richard Grayson, a state-certified write-in candidate in the Sept. 2 primary for the GOP nomination in the Fourth Congressional District, professed not to be worried by a new poll showing a majority of Arizona Republicans to be "functionally illiterate."
"I still believe I can get enough voters to write in my name to win," Grayson said, in response to a question from Arizona Republic political reporter Yvonne Wingett about the new poll. "Don't forget that independents can also vote in the Republican primary."
The poll of 350 registered Republican voters, conducted June 29-30 by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Arizona State University and Channel Eight/KAET-TV, revealed that 73% of them admitted to being "functionally illiterate."
Another 12% did not understand what the phrase "functionally illiterate" meant. The survey has a sampling error of plus or minus 5.2 percentage points.
According to Professor Bruce Merrill, who directs the poll, "Unless more Republicans learn how to write between now and Labor Day, Grayson may have a harder time than he thinks to beat Don Karg, whose name is on the ballot and has only seven letters in it."
