Al Cross: GOP Has chance For Kentucky Sweep.
GOP has chance for Kentucky sweep
By Al Cross
FRANKFORT, Ky. — Republicans have a good chance of making history in Tuesday's election by exceeding their record 53-seat gain in the U.S. House, which occurred in 1994, the last time voters concluded that Democrats had taken the results of a presidential election too far.
Will Republicans also make history in Kentucky, giving the state its first all-GOP congressional delegation? The anti-Washington wave could be so strong that both of Kentucky's Democratic U.S. representatives, John Yarmuth of Louisville and Ben Chandler of Versailles, could lose.
That prospect increased last week, as Democratic Senate nominee Jack Conway slipped in polls after running the notorious ad that implicitly questioned the religion of Republican Rand Paul.
Chandler said at a Democratic rally in Frankfort Thursday that he's proud to be on a Conway-led ticket, and “We all know that how he does affects everybody up and down the ticket.”
Chandler's 6th District race with Republican lawyer Andy Barr of Lexington has long been viewed as the state's closest congressional contest, and now one of the nation's tightest. The latest public polls, taken Oct. 15-21, both showed Chandler ahead by only 4 percentage points, well within the margin of error, and with less than the 50 percent minimum support incumbents like to see, especially in an anti-incumbent year.
Yarmuth's 3rd District race with Republican Todd Lally has a low national profile, but a Survey USA poll for this newspaper Oct. 21-25 showed it competitive, giving Yarmuth 50 percent and Lally 46 percent. Those numbers were also well within the error margin — which applies to each of those figures, not the difference between them (a statistical principle that is often forgotten or unreported).
However, a survey taken for Insight's cn|2 by Braun Research Oct. 18-19 showed Yarmuth with a huge 58-27 lead, prompting discussion about the polls' methodology. Braun uses live interviewers, while Survey USA uses recorded questions. Survey USA has a good track record, but evidence has surfaced this year that recorded polls are slightly biased toward Republican candidates.
Nate Silver, a respected polling specialist who writes The New York Times' Five Thirty Eight blog, has calculated that recorded polls overstate Republican support by an average of 2 percentage points, and that Survey USA does it by an average of 4 points. Silver calculated that live-interviewer polls overstate Democratic support by an average of 0.7 points.
The 3rd District polls could differ for other reasons. They were taken about four days apart and used different methodologies for determining likely voters. University of Kentucky political scientist Stephen Voss wrote in an online discussion on the cn|2 site that its polls seem to disregard the “enthusiasm gap” in other polls indicating that Republican voters are more likely to cast ballots.
Voss said that gap “has been greatly overstated,” but is still enough to mean that the best estimate of the 3rd District vote is probably “somewhere between cn|2 polls and the others.” I agree. It will take a huge, late Republican surge for Lally to beat Yarmuth, and that would be a major upset.
Not so with Chandler and Barr. Their race was the only absolute toss-up in Silver's Friday statistical ratings of House races, which he bases on polling, expert forecasts, fundraising, past election returns and other indicators.
The district usually votes Republican in federal races, Chandler being the exception, thanks to his moderate record and family name. But this time he faces what he calls a perfect storm: a poor economy, an unpopular president whom he endorsed in the 2008 primary, his vote for that president's cap-and-trade system to fight climate change and the National Republican Congressional Committee's early decision to run ads attacking him — a relatively inexpensive decision because the district has only one major media market, and one that helped draw ads from GOP-allied groups.
“The outside money has been a huge factor in this,” Chandler told me after the rally. “The single most historic thing about this election is going to be the Supreme Court decision” allowing unlimited, undisclosed political contributions.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has come to Chandler's aid, and his family has pulled out the stops. Their newspaper, The Woodford Sun, which rarely runs editorials, had one this week urging voters in their Republican-voting county to “help the home boy.” Chandler said the paper also endorsed him when he ran for governor in 2003 and for Congress in 2004.
The ad war of the campaigns and their allies has rivaled the ugliness of the Senate race. It must be one of those in which the truth has suffered most.
Republicans have tied Chandler's vote for Obama's stimulus package to a related job for his wife in the state Transportation Cabinet, saying “The Chandlers get an $80,000 job. We get the bill, and no jobs.” But the stimulus created many jobs, and Chandler says he had nothing to do with his wife's transfer back to an agency where she had worked for many years.
The Democrats have called Barr “a convicted criminal,” based on his guilty plea at the age of 19 to possession of a fake driver's license. That's a stretch to the breaking point, as is Chandler's repeated assertion that Barr wants to privatize Social Security and do away with Medicare. Barr endorsed a budget plan that could lead to such things, but he didn't endorse them specifically.
The TV nastiness could drive down voter turnout and hurt Chandler's chances. On the other hand, he could benefit from heavy turnout in Lexington for the mayor's race, in which his friend, Vice Mayor Jim Gray, pulled ahead of Mayor Jim Newberry in the latest public poll; and the fact that Lexington was the site of the nationally noticed incident in which a Paul campaign activist stomped on a MoveOn.org protester who tried to stage a stunt with Paul.
Chandler says his own poll last week showed him with a lead outside the error margin, but he acknowledges that the result hinges on who votes. “If it's a big enough wave,” he said, “no telling what'll happen.”
Al Cross, former Courier-Journal political writer, is director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky. His e-mail address is al.cross@uky.edu. His views are his own, not those of the University of Kentucky.
By Al Cross
FRANKFORT, Ky. — Republicans have a good chance of making history in Tuesday's election by exceeding their record 53-seat gain in the U.S. House, which occurred in 1994, the last time voters concluded that Democrats had taken the results of a presidential election too far.
Will Republicans also make history in Kentucky, giving the state its first all-GOP congressional delegation? The anti-Washington wave could be so strong that both of Kentucky's Democratic U.S. representatives, John Yarmuth of Louisville and Ben Chandler of Versailles, could lose.
That prospect increased last week, as Democratic Senate nominee Jack Conway slipped in polls after running the notorious ad that implicitly questioned the religion of Republican Rand Paul.
Chandler said at a Democratic rally in Frankfort Thursday that he's proud to be on a Conway-led ticket, and “We all know that how he does affects everybody up and down the ticket.”
Chandler's 6th District race with Republican lawyer Andy Barr of Lexington has long been viewed as the state's closest congressional contest, and now one of the nation's tightest. The latest public polls, taken Oct. 15-21, both showed Chandler ahead by only 4 percentage points, well within the margin of error, and with less than the 50 percent minimum support incumbents like to see, especially in an anti-incumbent year.
Yarmuth's 3rd District race with Republican Todd Lally has a low national profile, but a Survey USA poll for this newspaper Oct. 21-25 showed it competitive, giving Yarmuth 50 percent and Lally 46 percent. Those numbers were also well within the error margin — which applies to each of those figures, not the difference between them (a statistical principle that is often forgotten or unreported).
However, a survey taken for Insight's cn|2 by Braun Research Oct. 18-19 showed Yarmuth with a huge 58-27 lead, prompting discussion about the polls' methodology. Braun uses live interviewers, while Survey USA uses recorded questions. Survey USA has a good track record, but evidence has surfaced this year that recorded polls are slightly biased toward Republican candidates.
Nate Silver, a respected polling specialist who writes The New York Times' Five Thirty Eight blog, has calculated that recorded polls overstate Republican support by an average of 2 percentage points, and that Survey USA does it by an average of 4 points. Silver calculated that live-interviewer polls overstate Democratic support by an average of 0.7 points.
The 3rd District polls could differ for other reasons. They were taken about four days apart and used different methodologies for determining likely voters. University of Kentucky political scientist Stephen Voss wrote in an online discussion on the cn|2 site that its polls seem to disregard the “enthusiasm gap” in other polls indicating that Republican voters are more likely to cast ballots.
Voss said that gap “has been greatly overstated,” but is still enough to mean that the best estimate of the 3rd District vote is probably “somewhere between cn|2 polls and the others.” I agree. It will take a huge, late Republican surge for Lally to beat Yarmuth, and that would be a major upset.
Not so with Chandler and Barr. Their race was the only absolute toss-up in Silver's Friday statistical ratings of House races, which he bases on polling, expert forecasts, fundraising, past election returns and other indicators.
The district usually votes Republican in federal races, Chandler being the exception, thanks to his moderate record and family name. But this time he faces what he calls a perfect storm: a poor economy, an unpopular president whom he endorsed in the 2008 primary, his vote for that president's cap-and-trade system to fight climate change and the National Republican Congressional Committee's early decision to run ads attacking him — a relatively inexpensive decision because the district has only one major media market, and one that helped draw ads from GOP-allied groups.
“The outside money has been a huge factor in this,” Chandler told me after the rally. “The single most historic thing about this election is going to be the Supreme Court decision” allowing unlimited, undisclosed political contributions.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has come to Chandler's aid, and his family has pulled out the stops. Their newspaper, The Woodford Sun, which rarely runs editorials, had one this week urging voters in their Republican-voting county to “help the home boy.” Chandler said the paper also endorsed him when he ran for governor in 2003 and for Congress in 2004.
The ad war of the campaigns and their allies has rivaled the ugliness of the Senate race. It must be one of those in which the truth has suffered most.
Republicans have tied Chandler's vote for Obama's stimulus package to a related job for his wife in the state Transportation Cabinet, saying “The Chandlers get an $80,000 job. We get the bill, and no jobs.” But the stimulus created many jobs, and Chandler says he had nothing to do with his wife's transfer back to an agency where she had worked for many years.
The Democrats have called Barr “a convicted criminal,” based on his guilty plea at the age of 19 to possession of a fake driver's license. That's a stretch to the breaking point, as is Chandler's repeated assertion that Barr wants to privatize Social Security and do away with Medicare. Barr endorsed a budget plan that could lead to such things, but he didn't endorse them specifically.
The TV nastiness could drive down voter turnout and hurt Chandler's chances. On the other hand, he could benefit from heavy turnout in Lexington for the mayor's race, in which his friend, Vice Mayor Jim Gray, pulled ahead of Mayor Jim Newberry in the latest public poll; and the fact that Lexington was the site of the nationally noticed incident in which a Paul campaign activist stomped on a MoveOn.org protester who tried to stage a stunt with Paul.
Chandler says his own poll last week showed him with a lead outside the error margin, but he acknowledges that the result hinges on who votes. “If it's a big enough wave,” he said, “no telling what'll happen.”
Al Cross, former Courier-Journal political writer, is director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky. His e-mail address is al.cross@uky.edu. His views are his own, not those of the University of Kentucky.
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