Matt Bevin? Who's That, And Who Cares?

The Daily Beast bravely pretends that Matt Bevin has a shot in the Kentucky GOP primary against Mitch The Turtle.

Most Southern towns of any size have something like the Lexington Club, where behind a nondescript door with a keypad lies a warmly decorated clubhouse, complete with a fire in the fireplace, thick cigar smoke in the air, and portraits of both Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee on the wall. 

The presence of both portraits signify the state’s complicated past. But the present is not much less complex: The Bevin-McConnell race is the biggest battle yet in a Republican civil war that’s been raging since 2010. 

And Bevin’s reinforcements have begun to arrive in Kentucky. 

The SCF kicked in half of the $900,000 Bevin raised in the last quarter of 2014. The Madison Project is opening five Get Out the Vote offices in areas in which McConnell has traditionally done well. FreedomWorks recently endorsed Bevin, but they too had trouble with his name. 

“If you have not heard, FreedomWorks has recently endorsed Matt Blevins for U.S. Senate and we are now looking to employ Field Staffers for Kentucky,” said one email.

Reinforcements!  The underdog is going to fight back!  Senate minority leader defeated in a primary! 

Hogwash.

Perhaps the equally irrelevant Daily Beast might have tried to get this article out before Friday's poll showing Bevin down 26 points with only 14 weeks to go.  And McConnell has more than five times Bevin's money.

As much as I'd love to see a Tea Party puke like Bevin get stomped in November by Alison Grimes, his message that government is evil in a state that's 92% white and where one in six households has food insecurity isn't going to cut it.  Republicans know Mitch brought home the pork and they'll vote for him over Bevin.  Remember too this is a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by half a million.  Only 38% of the state's registered voters are Republican, and we have closed primaries here.

So the people Bevin needs to reach are the "hands off my government programs!" folks in some of the poorest, least diverse counties in America.  That's working about as well as expected, and he's down 26 points as a result.

I want to see McConnell lose.  But he won't be beaten by Matt Bevin.