“Only The People Who Don’t Do Anything Don’t Do Anything Wrong,”

Steve Beshear coattails may not be long
Down-ticket Dems lack large leads
Written by Joseph Gerth

The one takeaway from polling released last week by Public Policy Polling is that if you’re a politician in Kentucky and your name isn’t Steve Beshear, chances are you’re not real well liked.

The poll found that, if the election for governor were held today, Beshear would win re-election over Senate President David Williams by a whopping 27 percentage points.

But the poll also found that Beshear doesn’t have long coattails — at least not yet.

The polling firm, based in North Carolina, is a Democratic pollster but Nate Silver, The New York Times’ polling guru, calculated that the company’s polls had a slight bias toward Republicans during the 2010 elections.

Sure, Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway leads his Republican challenger, Hopkins County Attorney Todd P’Pool, by a significant margin — but he’s coming off a U.S. Senate campaign that gave him almost universal name recognition.

And in the treasurer’s race, incumbent Todd Hollenbach has ridden an uneventful first term and strong political name in Jefferson County to a 15-point lead over Republican K.C. Crosbie.

But in other down-ticket races, Democrats have only narrow advantages.

According to the poll, Alison Lundergan Grimes leads GOP nominee Bill Johnson by only 3 percentage points in the race for secretary of state, while Beshear’s former chief of staff, Adam Edelen, leads John Kemper by 3 points as well.

And in the agriculture commissioner’s race, Republican Jamie Comer leads Democrat Bob Farmer by a point.

Grimes, Edelen and Comer have all outraised their opponents by significant margins, so it won’t be surprising if they all begin to pull away as the election nears and they step up their advertising. But none has a great following at this point.

Meanwhile, the pollster found that only 37 percent of voters in Kentucky approve of the job Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is doing in Washington, while 50 percent say they disapprove.

And Kentucky’s junior senator, Republican Rand Paul, is also upside down, with 42 percent approving of the job he’s doing and 44 percent disapproving.

But according to the poll, Williams is the most unpopular of all the politicians it tested in Kentucky. Only 21 percent of voters said they have a favorable opinion of him, while 54 percent said they had an unfavorable opinion.

Meanwhile, Beshear was tied with Tennessee’s Bill Haslam as the fourth-most-popular governor in the 42 states the pollster tested.

So, why is Beshear — who has failed to push through many of his plans — so popular?

For one, he’s done a pretty good job of playing to conservative Democrats in Kentucky.

For instance, Beshear has endorsed the so-called “Ark Park,” he has opposed the Obama administration on coal, and his first ads noted that his father and grandfather were preachers.

Beshear also gets credit for managing the state’s budget in what he says is the worst economic climate since the Great Depression.

Sure, it’s the House and Senate that have written and approved budgets, but it was up to Beshear to carry out those spending plans and make cuts.

Williams argues that Beshear has no big ideas and has been little more than a caretaker.

It is true that Beshear hasn’t pushed through many big ideas — in part because Williams has blocked them in the Senate and in part because there has been no money to pay for new programs.

In a strange way, that may be helping Beshear.

A preacher calling to correct a story I wrote more than 20 years ago told me not to fret about my error. “Only the people who don’t do anything don’t do anything wrong,” he said.