NBC/Marist: Stabenow now up 21 points
There was a time, not very long ago, that Republicans had the seat of second-term Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan squarely on their target list. The NRSC had successfully recruited 2010 gubernatorial candidate and former Rep. Peter Hoekstra to run against her, and polls showed a race in the high single digits, with Stabenow underneath the 50 percent threshold in a number of them.
Then, on Super Bowl weekend, Hoekstra decided to run an ad that was designed to highlight what Hoekstra derided as profligate spending by Stabenow in the Senate that was leading to an elevated national debt. Which sounds boring, unless you also know that the ad was delivered by an Asian actress (riding a bicycle through what looked like a rice field, no less) in a rendition that immediately drew condemnation from both the left and the right.
The impact was pretty immediate, and unremittingly negative. A PPP poll last week showed Hoesktra down 14 percent to Stabenow, nearly double the lead she held prior to that. Wednesday morning, NBC News (through Marist) packaged a Senate poll into their look at next week's GOP primary. The numbers are, shall we say, startling:
Marist for NBC News. 2/19-2/20. Registered voters. MoE 1.8%.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D): 53
Peter Hoekstra (R): 32
The poll marks a continued erosion in independent support for Hoekstra. NBC/Marist had Stabenow up a fairly lofty 46-34 with independent voters. For a Republican to win a state as Democratic-leaning as Michigan, they absolutely need a lead with the indies, and probably a double digit one, at that.
To show the speed at which Hoekstra has lost independent voters, consider: PPP polled the race a week ago, and they had Stabenow up 43-39 with indies. And even that was a marked departure from PPP's poll in the state last summer, when it was Hoekstra that had the edge with nonaffiliated voters (44-38).
Usually, it is a tough sell to peg a race's shifts on one group of voters, but Hoesktra dominated with Republicans in all three surveys in question, and got smooshed with Democrats in all three. This is almost exclusively attributed to the shift among independent voters, who apparently do not like the kind of overt racial appeals that ol' Pete "Spend-it-Not" attempted.
