Playing catch up here but this poll was released yesterday:
http://blog.pennlive.com/...
A Mercyhurst University poll of 479 registered voters conducted from Sept. 15 through Sept. 24 gives Democrat Tom Wolf a 43 percent to 28 percent lead over Republican Gov. Tom Corbett with 22 percent undecided.
The results, "reflect widespread disapproval of the job Corbett is doing as governor of the Keystone State," Mercyhurst pollsters said, stealthily tracking to the obvious to its lair, where they jumped upon it and throttled it with great enthusiasm.
And when those same poll respondents were asked whether theyr approved or disapproved of Corbett's job performance after more than three years at the helm, barely a third of voters (31 percent) said they approved, while a majority (51 percent) said they did not.
Wolf leads Corbett by an average of almost 16 percentage points across a variety of polls, according to data compiled by RealClear Politics. - The Patriot-News, 9/29/14
Pretty consistent with the other polls:
http://earlyreturns.post-gazette.com/...
Franklin and Marshall College: The latest poll by Terry Madonna's outfit has a little bit of good news for everyone. For Tom Wolf, Mr. Corbett's Democratic opponent: a lead of54-34 percentage points among likely voters, the same kind of double-digit spread that F&M pollsters have come up with since May. For Mr. Corbett: a tighter race. An F&M poll in August showed only 24 percent of likely voters picking Mr. Corbett. The governor is also getting more backing from his base; 62 percent of Republicans say they intend to vote for Mr. Corbett, as opposed to 48 percent in the August poll.
Mercyhurst University: The school's Center for Applied Politics weighed in for the first time and the results were rough for Mr. Corbett. Among registered voters polled, 43 percent said they would vote for Mr. Wolf if the election was held today, while 28 percent would vote to re-elect the governor. One glimmer of hope for the incumbent? Twenty-two percent of those polled said they had yet to make up their minds.
Keystone Report/Magellan Strategies BR: The right-leaning news site commissioned Republican polling firm Magellan Strategies BR to update its numbers for the first time and, perhaps without too much surprise, it came up with Mr. Wolf holding a lead of just 9 percentage points. That's an improvement over Keystone's July poll, which showed Mr. Corbett trailing by 12 percentage points. That change is attributed to the same factor that F&M noticed: Republicans are finally lining up behind the governor (76 percent support in July versus 83 percent in the new poll.
A word about Pennsylvania's pollsters: When F&M released its August poll, it drew open hostility from the Corbett campaign, which accused Mr. Madonna of trying to influence the election, perhaps because Mr. Wolf's wife sits on the college's board of trustees. But no matter what you think about that tiff, Madonna and F&M have a solid reputation behind them. Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com last week released rankings of major polling outfits across the country, and F&M earned the second-highest ranking of the Pennsylvania-based groups. We urge you to take a look at Mr. Silver's explanation, but if you're interested in the grades, they're right here:
Muhlenberg College: A-
Franklin & Marshall College: B+
Commonwealth Foundation: C+
Harper Polling: C+
Philadelphia Inquirer: C+
Temple University: C+
Susquehanna Polling and Research: C
Millersville University: D-
- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9/29/14
Wolf isn't just leading in the polls either:
http://lancasteronline.com/...
Campaign finance reports show Tom Wolf, the Democratic nominee, raised more money here than incumbent Tom Corbett in the past three months and is sitting on a bigger war chest as the candidates for governor head into the final weeks of the campaign.
Reports filed last week from June 10 through Sept. 15 have Wolf far ahead of his GOP opponent in the race for local support, outraising Corbett by a nearly 3-to-1 margin.
More than 500 local individuals and businesses so far this year have been willing to lay down some cash to help finance the person they believe should lead the state.
An examination of the contributions since last fall show Corbett still dominates the cash race here but that Wolf has gained considerable ground during the last two reporting periods. - Lancaster Online, 9/29/14
Also Corbett's been getting some bad press lately:
http://www.thefrisky.com/...
Last week, the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office released a slew of sexually explicit emails, pictures and videos that had been discovered in email exchanges between eight staffers of Republican Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett. The imagery was allegedly circulated when Corbett still served as the state’s attorney general, a position he left in January 2011 when he was elected governor. Corbett, who is currently running for re-election, claims he had no knowledge of the emails at the time and that while he was told about “inappropriate” emails in May, he hasn’t seen the imagery in question. Attorney general Kathleen Kane, whose team made the discovery, initially refused to share the explicit emails with the public but eventually allowed a select few journalists to view the footage in the company of armed agents.
According to the Philadelphia Daily News, the content included a video of a woman masturbating with a lit cigar and another with a bowling pin. In one video, a man dressed like a race-car driver inserts an uncorked bottle of champagne into a woman’s vagina. A series of pornographic spoofs of motivational posters were found as well, one of which showed two women performing oral sex for a guy at a desk with the caption: ”Devotion: making your boss happy is your only job.” Another shows a woman having anal sex with dude at his desk with and is captioned: “Resourcefulness: Taking advantage of every opening.” Ugh.
The Daily News also shared that five of the staffers who allegedly circulated the content took on high-ranking jobs when Corbett became governor — like State Police Commissioner, Department of Environmental Protection Secretary and a former Press Secretary who ironically is now an advisor on Corbett’s re-election campaign. In fact, the motivational poster spoofs were found in the police commissioners inbox — not exactly the behavior you’d prefer from your local police force at their work desks, is it?
The images were reportedly found during an internal review of how Corbett’s office handled the Jerry Sandusky child abuse case during his days as attorney general. Kane was trying to determine why it took Corbett’s team a full year to recommend charges against Sandusky once the truth of his abusive behavior came out. Kane discovered that basic investigative steps like searching Sandusky’s home hadn’t been taken, but she found no evidence that Corbett intentionally slowed down Sandusky’s case for political gain. - The Frisky, 9/29/14
And here's another sign Corbett and the GOP are getting desperate to take the bad press off them by tying Wolf to Kermit Gosnell:
http://www.slate.com/...
I have no problem with hard-hitting political ads, as long as they're based in truth. But this flier—which Corbett's campaign says was produced by the state Republican Party and which Pennsylvania radio and TV commentator Michael Smerconish posted to Twitter on Monday—implies that Wolf supports policies that would allow another Kermit Gosnell to flourish. There's no reason to believe that. Gosnell was a doctor who was performing illegal abortions—and actually killing babies—in a filthy Pennsylvania clinic and who managed to go undetected for years because the state regulatory agencies ignored repeated complaints about him. His clinic was eventually raided on a warrant related to his role in distributing illegal drugs, and he was eventually found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder and one count of involuntary manslaughter.
Wolf is pro-choice and has spoken out specifically against "backward legislation signed into law by Governor Corbett that restricts a woman’s right to make her own personal health care decisions." Corbett did sign a law requiring abortion clinics to meet the same standards for ambulatory surgical centers, even though there is no medical reason to believe these standards make clinics safer. More importantly, there is no reason to think that Corbett's law had any role to play in preventing future Gosnells from operating. The problem in Pennsylvania wasn't a lack of restrictions on abortion providers; it was that the restrictions that already existed weren't being enforced. And there's no particular reason to lay that problem at the feet of Democrats, as Gosnell was finally arrested in 2010, while Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell was still in office.
Nor does the Gosnell case actually suggest that abortion clinics need to be subject to a more stringent set of regulations than other clinics doing similar procedures like colonoscopies. Any doctor who runs a clinic as filthy and poorly staffed as Gosnell's should be shut down. Any doctor selling prescription drugs illegally is breaking the law. Oh yeah, and any doctor—and person, actually—who kills babies would be convicted of murder. No extra regulations necessary. The only abortion-specific law of which Gosnell was found guilty was not forcing women to wait 24 hours for an abortion, and it strains all credulity to think that's the law that's going to stop future immoral doctors from running shoddy clinics that prey on poor people. - Slate, 9/25/14
And of course the RGA is wasting it's time on this race by sending this guy to try and save Corbett:
http://www.pennlive.com/...
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was on the stump for Gov. Tom Corbett at the Republican Party of Pennsylvania's Fall Dinner in East Pennsboro Township on Friday, and he told the crowd he's now their second governor.
"My only job is watching you," Christie warned. "Don't disappoint me. Don't make me come back here and get angry. It is an ugly, ugly thing."
Christie said it's up to Pennsylvania Republicans to make sure Corbett wins the race -- in which polls have shown the incumbent trailing Wolf by double digits -- and he'll be back to monitor their progress a few times before the Nov. 4 election.
Corbett hasn't always enjoyed overwhelming GOP support, but a recent Franklin & Marshall poll showed Republicans returning to the governor as the election draws near, with GOP support growing from less than 50 percent in August to 62 percent in September. - The Patriot-News, 9/26/14
Of course Wolf is taking this race seriously and is rallying every key constituency:
http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/...
Democratic candidate Tom Wolf traveled to Philadelphia today, courting the Latino vote in his race against the Republican incumbent, Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett.
Wolf’s visit to a popular lounge in Hunting Park was billed as a “Latinos for Wolf” kickoff rally, and it coincided with National Voter Registration Day.
Getting out the vote was the centerpiece of Wolf’s brief speech to a crowd of several dozen supporters.
“I know the polls have me way ahead,” he said, “but that’s gonna lead to some complacency. And it might mean that when we get to November 4th, the election is not going to go the way I certainly want it to go and the way I think you ought to want it to go. I’m not going to win if we’re complacent. So we need to get out the vote. I need your support.” - CBS Philadelphia, 9/23/14
And Wolf is reminding voters that turnout is key:
http://www.ydr.com/...
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Wolf of Mount Wolf called for reinvestment not only into state infrastructure but in the democratic process itself.
Wolf was speaking to the roughly 250 attendees of the annual George M. Leader Democratic Dinner held at the Holiday Inn in West Manchester Township Saturday night.
By way of introduction, Democratic Party of York County Chairman Bob Kefauver touted Wolf's success in the Democratic primary earlier this year when he won all 67 counties and garnered nearly 70 percent of the vote.
Wolf said that while that may be true, voter turnout was low, paling in comparison to the America of centuries ago and even that of newer democracies elsewhere in the world. He called voting "central to who we are" and called the election to be about democracy itself.
The namesake of the annual dinner, George Leader, is the only governor of Pennsylvania from York County to date. Leader, who died last year, served from 1955 to 1959. Wolf said that when he heard Leader speak years ago, "he talked about Pennsylvania in terms of its history."
"In the spirit of George Leader, I think we need to define ourselves what we're for and not what we're against," he continued. - York Daily Report, 9/28/14
I'm very confident we are going to win this race but turnout is still important. Click here to donate and get involved with Wolf's campaign, State Senator Mike Stack's (D. PA) Lt. Governor campaign and the Pennsylvania Democratic Party so we can take back the State Senate:
http://www.wolfforpa.com/
http://www.stackforpa.com/
http://www.padems.com/