Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Poll: Rand Paul leads Trey Grayson

Rand Paul for U.S. Senate

According to a new WHAS-11 (Louisville) poll, Rand Paul leads among Republicans in the Senate race six months before the primary, but within the margin of error:

Paul: 35%
Grayson: 32%
Others or undecided: 34%
4.1% margin of error

This is an increase of 5 points for Rand Paul and a decrease of 9 points for Trey Grayson from an earlier WHAS poll in August.

WHAS's coverage below. Notice at the end how they begin to wonder if the hand-picked establishment candidate might have to be replaced by a veteran George W. Bush fundraiser!



Also see the Reuters story here.

5 comments:

Joe "Truth 101" Kelly said...

I'm glad for you that Rand is up a bit in the current polls Carl. He is of course going to have to win the primary by a large total I think to keep the regular republican party in your state from supporting a third party candidate in the general election. While splitting republican votes would be good for whomever the Democrats pick, I would on a personal level feel bad for all those that worked hard for Rand Paul only to see his campaign sabotaged in that way.


The regular republican party will field a candidate that will support the spend, borrow and foreign entanglement policies of the last eight years. I will disagree with Rand Paul on how much government is too much an most issues, but he is on the right track fiscally and internationally. I wish a few more Democrats would move closer to his approach on these matters.

Carl Wicklander said...

I can't really see the GOP ever endorsing a third party candidate except in a case like New York's Conservative Party, of which there is no real equivalent in Kentucky. But they won't go down without a fight. There's rumbling that Cathy Bates, who is the veteran fundraiser for Bush mentioned in the video, might enter the race.

Another option is that they might back Bill Johnson, a candidate who's been in the race this whole time but who hasn't had much press. He fits the Republican paradigm quite well: businessman, ex-military, pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, and for pre-emptive war. His platform strikes me as one that could be easily co-opted by the GOP.

If Rand Paul gets enough exposure and the base gets behind him, he could get regular party support. We saw that in New York when the GOP backed Doug Hoffman after the Republican dropped out. They went with him because he was the one who had the momentum going into the election, even though he ended up losing.

Sabotage of some sort is a distinct possibility. The party leadership really does hate us. Even though Ron Paul is an incumbent, they always end up backing his opponent in his primary. The tougher fight is almost certainly with the Republicans, not the Democrats.

Joe "Truth 101" Kelly said...

"The tougher fight is almost certainly with the Republicans, not the Democrats."

Very true Carl. The party owns the lists. You will find polls that have been conducted from these lists to have been tainted. There are other things that will go on also but the polls skewed polls can really wreak havoc on election day if there is nobody experienced enough to see what happened. You will have to have many regular republicans that have been involved in elections and get out the vote efforts on your side.

Law and Order Teacher said...

CW,
I would like to say that Paul is my kind of conservative. I can't vote for him, but I would if I could. His positions are pretty much in line with my own and I am impressed with his command of the issues. His opponent seems to be conducting a 19th century front porch campaign. Good luck with Paul and I hope he is successful.

Jeremiah Whitmoore said...

This election will say a lot about the vaunted Republican base and what it actually stands for. Does it actually give a damn about themselves or is it entirely controlled by neocons and corporate backers that are diametrically opposed to their own interests? Kentucky will be a bellwether about the future of the liberty/constitutionalist remnant of our republic and whether they actually have one.