SurveyUSA is out with their first post-primary poll of the Kentucky Senate race, and they find Rand Paul (R) leading Jack Conway (D), 51%-45%. This is their first one matching those two up in 2010. (They had polls in March and April asking if they'd vote for the Republican or the Democrat in November, but without any names attached.)
Now, this was much earlier, but SurveyUSA did ask about the Paul-Conway matchup back in August and November of 2009. And in those polls, Conway was LEADING Paul. But that was before the candidates really got serious with TV commercials and grassroots outreach, so I'm not sure how much we can extract from those 2009 polls.
Some numbers of note: Conway is only getting 68% of Democrats, Paul is getting 21% of "liberals", and Conway is losing every age group except those under the age of 35. But I'll explain after the fold why you shouldn't worry that Paul is getting 15% of black voters.
First, I think that this SurveyUSA poll, along with the DailyKos poll, are pretty good signs that the Rasmussen poll showing Paul up by 25 points right after the primary was pure and utter bullshit.
Now, keep in mind that when I talk about these subgroups, the margin of error for those numbers increases quite a bit. With a sample size of 569 likely (as determined by SurveyUSA) voters, that already translates to a margin of error of 4.1%.
So one number that immediately sticks out is that among blacks, Paul is getting 15%. That sounds shocking, until you realize that blacks make up less than 6% of the poll sample (only 32 people total). And so the subgroups have ASTRONOMICAL margins of error. When n=32, in fact, the margin of error is an enormous 17%. So 0% is within the margin of error, which is probably much closer to what Paul will actually get from that subgroup. :-)
The latest Census figures estimate blacks at a bit under 8% of the population, so the 6% is hardly out of line. In fact, given that this will be a midterm election where black turnout is expected to drop dramatically compared to 2008, 6% may even still be overstating it, unless they get very motivated to stop Rand Paul. Will they?
Interestingly enough, Paul holds a commanding 59%-38% lead among college graduates, while Conway leads 49%-46% among those that don't have a college degree.
Both Paul and Conway are getting 65% from the pro-life and pro-choice crowds, respectively. The problem is that many, many more Kentuckians consider themselves pro-life (57%) than pro-choice (40%).
SurveyUSA even asked about their views of the Tea Party. Of those who have a favorable view, not surprisingly, Paul has a commanding 90%-9% lead. And of those who don't like the Tea Party, Conway has an even better 93%-3% lead. But only 24% of Kentuckians don't like the Tea Party, while 36% do. Paul also leads 49%-45% among those who are neutral with respect to the Tea Party. But Conway leads 56%-35% among those with no opinion of the Tea Party, which sounds like low-information voters. (I mean, how can you still have no opinion of them after all this time??)
A strange statistic is that Conway is only leading 75%-21% among self-identified liberals. Though they only make up 13% of the population, which means the margin of error on that subgroup is at almost 12%. So Conway could really be leading them by an 87%-9% margin. Still... liberals for Rand Paul?? Did they think they were answering "libertarian" or something?
Now what about Democrats? I want to say some more about party identification. Conway is only pulling in 68% of Democrats, and Paul is getting a big 29% piece of them. But this actually makes sense historically, because you have a LOT of Kentucky "Democrats" who haven't voted for an actual Democrat in a federal election in years, if not decades. I saw someone on MSNBC recently say that many stay Democrats simply out of tradition, and to have a say in the Democratic primary for Governor, because save for Ernie Fletcher (R), most of the action took place in the primary.
So when Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 1.6:1 margin in Kentucky, and yet McCain gets over 57% of the vote, and even a very embattled Mitch McConnell gets 53% of the vote, that tells you a HUGE number of "Democrats" are voting Republican. Which has been the case in recent years.
In 2008, 600,000 Democrats voted in the U.S. Senate primary compared to less than 200,000 Republicans voting in the GOP primary. But McConnell, a Republican, still got re-elected in the general election.
It was the same story in 1998, the last time Kentucky had an open U.S. Senate seat. That year, Democrats had a six-way race, with three candidates receiving more than 155,000 votes. Compare that to a two-person GOP primary, where winner Bunning got only 152,000 votes overall. Bunning, of course, went on to win in November.
We also need to stop bragging about how even Mongiardo got more votes than Paul did in the primary. That's basically irrelevant, because of the significant registration difference. I'm thinking a lot of those Mongiardo voters will be Paul voters come November, unless Paul self-destructs. As the WaPo points out, a troubling statistic is that Democrats had ALWAYS turned out a higher percentage of their voters than Republicans had in EVERY single year going back to 1982, until this year, when Republicans came out in higher numbers. Only 31.8% of registered Democrats voted, while 33.6% of Republicans did. And compared to recent midterm elections, the percent of Democrats that showed up to vote was actually DOWN, the lowest since 1994, while the percent of Republicans is at its HIGHEST level since 1998. In that sense, the energy is with the teabaggers.
And when you think of Kentucky Democrats, Research 2000 did a poll for the Lexington Herald-Leader that showed 12% of Kentucky Democrats have a favorable view of the Tea Party, but only 46% have an unfavorable view. Not even a majority of Democrats think badly of the Tea Party in Kentucky. Chew on that.
It's surprising that less than half of Kentucky Democrats have a negative view of the Tea Party, said Del Ali, president of Research 2000, which conducted the poll.
"I thought that would be much higher," he said. "I would guess if that we polled other states heavy in Democratic registration like Kentucky, the attitude toward the Tea Party would be more unfavorable than 46 percent among Democrats."
Of Kentucky's 2.85 million registered voters, about 57 percent are Democrats and 37 percent Republicans.
The poll underscores that "Kentucky is a very conservative state that is wary of the federal government and where Democratic President Obama is unpopular," said Ali.
I think that if anything, like we saw how Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R) improved her standing among Arizona whites after signing the immigration bill, I think Paul's statements helped him with whites in Kentucky. And in a state that's 90% white, that's almost game over right there.
Now, before you think this is a doom and gloom diary, it's not. But I want us to have realistic expectations, and not just think that Paul will be un-electable because of his statements. Paul's words have been MAJOR news stories in the past two weeks, so saying these likely voters have no idea what Paul said doesn't strike me as that good of an argument. We're still behind the 8-ball in this race, make no mistake about it. We will have to work our butts off to get Conway elected instead of Paul. Thinking Paul will simply self-destruct is very dangerous hubris.