Talk Elections

40-37 Conway/Comer
44-36 Conway/Bevin
43-34 Conway/Heiner
43-30 Conway/Bailey

http://gravismarketing.com/polling-and-market-research/kentucky-poll-democrat-conway-leads-gop-contenders-in-governors-race

Eh, still predicting Comer by Paul-esque margins.

This was about where Beshear was in early 2011, IIRC.

Conway nxt governor of KY.

Conway would be a great governor. But with KY I don't know what to expect.

Toss-Up for now, but I'm worried that this will eventually become the bad-for-democrats version of the 2014 Michigan Senate Race - a race that looks really competitive early on, only to be a blowout come election day.

Beshear was also an established name, a strong campaigner, and faced subpar opponents. Whatever you say about Comer, Bevin, or even Heiner, they aren't entirely subpar.

Dems were a month before the election, on the verge of winning the midterms, but a week out, the tide turned against them on terrorism and elbola.

I doubt that Conway has anything to worry about, especially that.

This is just blatantly false. They may have salvaged Tillis at most. You lost Kentucky by 15.5%! No prayer in Iowa. That doesn't happen in a month. The GOP was going to take the Senate all along. You are delusional if you think this was due to 11th hour issues. I understand thinking it at the time due to polling and wanting to be a little hackish, but there's no way you can say that in hindsight.

Brownback won by 4. LePage (despite Cutler dropping out with a week to go) and Hogan won by 5! These are not insignificant margins. It was pretty clear right away. On the governor side, maybe you would have salvaged Coakley without ebola. I'd like to think the people in Mass are smart enough not to buy into that like the ignorant parts of the country. That's just MoV issues not winner.

Conway seems to be a much better campaigner, so he probably would do better. My sense of Michigan was that a weak Republican just couldn't handle a high-profile race.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/did-republicans-blow-the-michigan-senate-race/381399/

You can't completely dismiss these early leads, but it's telling he's at 40-44%...toss up/tilt R for now.

Edit: Oh, just realized this was Gravis. >Gravis

Terriorism was the key issue in the election, and Ebola complicated the matter. In surveys, people disapproved the way Obama was handling it.  I think the tea party wave that swept the country on Nov 4th, was in part due to that.

> Gravis

[/thread]

2014 was hardly a tea party wave.  Most of the "tea-party backed" candidates couldn't get past the primaries.

I thought 2014 put to rest the idea that pollsters deviating from the mean should automatically be discredited.

Gravis can be like Ras: deviates from the mean, but in both ways. Some of their D-leaning polls included one showing Burke up five.

It did, but Gravis specifically has proven to have a crappy track record over periods of time. I'm not saying the result of the poll isn't true, its just its hard to know since Gravis has been wrong so many times (in both directions).

SurveyUSA is a terrible pollster.  I remember during Christie's first few months as NJ governor, most polls had his job approval in the 50s, but they had him underwater by nearly 2-1.

New Poll: Kentucky Governor by Gravis Marketing on 2015-01-06 (https://uselectionatlas.org/POLLS/GOVERNOR/2015/polls.php?action=indpoll&id=2120150106232)

Summary: D: 40%, R: 37%, U: 23%

Poll Source URL: Full Poll Details (http://gravismarketing.com/polling-and-market-research/kentucky-poll-democrat-conway-leads-gop-contenders-in-governors-race/)

     It's really early, but Kentucky is looking like the only close race of the three Gubernatorial elections this year.