Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Beshear Beatng Bevin Bigly

With ten weeks to go before the 2019 gubernatorial election here in Kentucky, the polls have Democratic AG Andy Beshear up substantially over GOP Gov. Matt Bevin.

An internal poll from the campaign of Andy Beshear shows the Democratic attorney general leading Gov. Matt Bevin by 9 percentage points in the race for governor, with a little over two months until the election.

The Courier Journal obtained a copy of the polling memo from the Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, which surveyed 501 likely voters in Kentucky from Monday through Thursday last week.

The poll found 48% of respondents would vote for Beshear, while 39% said they would vote for Bevin. Libertarian candidate John Hicks picked up 6% in the poll.

Of the 501 people surveyed, 43% self-identified as Republican and 37% self-identified as Democrat, while 48% considered themselves as conservative and 22% as liberal.

The results closely resemble an internal poll conducted by the Democratic Attorneys General Association a week earlier, which found Beshear leading Bevin by the exact same margin.

The last independent polling of Kentucky's race for governor came from the Gravis Marketing Survey in June. It found Bevin leading Beshear 48% to 42%.

If anything the poll favors Bevin, and yet the numbers clearly show Bevin has burned a number of bridges in the last three-plus years: with state and local government employees, teachers, farmers, and miners.

Still, if anything, Bevin shouldn't be sweating in the least.

Polling of statewide races in Kentucky has been notoriously flawed in recent years, especially the race for governor in 2015, when the Bluegrass Poll found Democrat Jack Conway leading Bevin by 5 percentage points late in the race. Bevin wound up winning on Election Day by 9 percentage points.

Bevin is fond of bringing up the erroneous polling from 2015 whenever he is asked about surveys showing him with a low approval rating, saying they are not a true indicator of the support he has throughout the state.

He's not wrong.  That Bluegrass poll from 2015 was cataclysmically wrong, off by 14 points.  In every instance turnout was much, much higher than anticipated and Kentucky voters turned out for Matt Bevin.  Bevin doesn't feel the need to do anything differently because he simply dismisses all polls showing Beshear ahead.  He's counting on that to happen again.

But they can't all be wrong, can they?

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