Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Expanding on the KY Senate race, Public Policy Polling notes that Paul and Conway are tied at 43%.  The real point however is that Jack Conway has become irrelevant to the race:  It's between who Kentuckians hate more, Rand Paul or Barack Obama...and it's a near thing. Tom Jensen:
Jack Conway has almost the same level of favorability as Paul- 31%- with much lower negatives at 29%. Usually you would expect a candidate with a +2 favorability to be defeating one with a -8. But Rand Paul's greatest asset in this race is Barack Obama. The President has only a 37% approval rating in Kentucky with 58% of voters disapproving of him. For the most part Democrats aren't going to be winning any seats they don't currently hold where the President's that unpopular but Paul's relative weakness is making this race more competitive than perhaps it should be.

Paul is winning 72% of the Republican vote to Conway's 65% of the Democratic vote. Kentucky may have the most conservative Democratic voters in the country. If Conway can get more than 80% of the vote from within his own party he'll more than likely win this race, but that may be a tall order when only 58% even of Democrats approve of the President's job performance.

The Kentucky Senate race may end up being decided by whether voters in the state find Barack Obama or Rand Paul more unpalatable- it should be a close one.
We'll see. This is still a state that McCain-Palin won by double-digits. if it comes down to who people hate more, it'll be close as he says.

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