If there’s one thing that you count on in California political journalism, it’s that when a Field Poll comes out, there will be a slew of stories about it. Why is that? Well, Mark DiCamillo and his gang at Field are pretty good at feeding the reporters. Check out the PDF Report that they issued today on Permananent Absentee Reporters.  It’s just so easy to write a story out of that. You just take one of those paragraphs, expand on it a bit, and poof! you’ve got a story. John Wildermuth, a fine reporter at the Chronicle, writes his article about the high percentage of Bay Area voters in the VBM pool from this little section in the report:

Permanent mail ballot registrants include proportionately more registrants living in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area and significantly fewer voters living in Los Angeles County.  For example, 29% of permanent mail ballot registrants live in the Bay Area compared to 21% of all voters statewide.  While 25% of all voters statewide live in Los Angeles County, just one in ten permanent mail ballot registrants (10%) reside in that county.  Because Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two to one on the Los Angeles County registration rolls, the significantly smaller share of the state’s permanent mail ballot registrants in Los Angeles County is a major factor contributing to the lower proportion of Democrats than Republicans among permanent mail ballot registrants statewide. (Field 11.30.07)

Dan Walters is more into restating the horse-race aspects, and well, there’s something for him in this report too:

Permanent mail ballot registrants include more registered Republicans than are found in the overall electorate.  Among permanent mail ballot registrants 41% are registered Republicans, 40% are registered Democrats and 19% are registered as declined to state or with another party.  This compares to the state’s overall party distribution of 42% registered Democrats, 34% registered Republicans and 24%  registered as declined to state or with another party.

And for Peter Hecht, well his is a smattering of a couple of paragraphs simmered down to a nice easily digested article.

Well, I hope you endjoyed some nice Journalism 101 for your Friday. I suppose the facts that PAVs tend to be rich, old, and white will shock nobody, but there you go.