Why Mitch McConnell Will Win

Naturally, we have been seeing a lot of chatter and news coverage on the possibility that Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky will be ousted from office next month as the polls in his race have tightened dramatically over the last month. This discussion is to be expected because Democrats would love to beat McConnell in revenge for the Republicans' defeat of former Democratic Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle in 2004. Even Chris Cillizza today removed Mississippi from his list of top ten Senate seats most likely to switch party hands, and replaced it with the Kentucky race.

I disagree with the sentiment that McConnell will lose. While there is no doubt that the race is astonishingly tight for a Kentucky Senate contest and a race involved a Senate Leader, I do not think McConnell will ultimately lose, and I have two reasons for this.

First, let's take a quick look at the recent polls over the last month since this race has basically knotted up:

49-46 McConnell (SUSA, 9/21-9/22)
45-44 McConnell (Mason-Dixon, 9/22-9/25)
51-42 McConnell (Rasmussen, 9/30)
46-42 McConnell (R2K, 10/14-10/16)
48-48 Tie (SUSA, 10/18-10/20)
47-43 McConnell (R2K, 10/19-10/21)
50-43 McConnell (Rasmussen, 10/21)

Averaged out we get

McConnell 48
Lunsford 44

If we substact the biggest outlier, which in this case would be the first Rasmussen poll, this adjusts to

McConnell 47.5
Lunsford 44.3

Either way, this race is tight and the incumbent is below 50 percent. This is not a place any longtime member of Congress wants to find himself in with a general election less than two weeks away. I have to believe that Congressman Ben Chandler and State Auditor Crit Luallen, two strong candidates the DSCC tried to get into the race, must be kicking themselves right now. While hindsight is 20-20, I imagine that if either of them were on the ballot against McConnell on November 4, they would be heading to the Senate next year.

Still, I think that while McConnell will sweat this one out until the night of November 4, he should win re-election. This is because while Kentucky voters are PO-ed at the Senator these days, they don't love his opponent, past (multiple) election loser, Bruce Lunsford. The numbers from the same polls referenced above bear out the challenger's likely biggest problem.

Personal favorables by poll

Mason-Dixon (9/22-9/25)
Mitch McConnell: 40/31 (+9)
Bruce Lunsford: 26/29 (-3)

Rasmussen (10/22; 9/30 data in parenthesis)
Mitch McConnell: 54/42 (56/40) -- Change: from +16 to +12
Bruce Lunsford: 46/47 (43/52) -- From -11 to -1

R2K (10/19-10/21; 10/14-10/16 data in parenthesis)
Mitch McConnell: 48/48 (47/46 ) -- From +1 to +0
Bruce Lunsford: 47/45 (48/45 ) -- From +3 to +2

The simple fact is that while McConnell is showing awful favorable numbers for a longtime Senator and the godfather of his state's Republican Party establishment, his opponent isn't much more popular. For whatever reason, and there are plenty of reasons we won't get into, a lot of Kentucky voters do not love Bruce Lunsford either.

Of the pollsters, only R2K has had him recently above .500 in his personal split, and just barely. Rasmussen and Mason-Dixon have had him below to the Mendoza Line. Additionally, while R2K has been finding McConnell himself at around an even split, the other two have put him more in the blue. Whichever one is most accurate, Mason-Dixon and R2K have the race a bit tighter than Rasmussen's polls. All of them find the contest close nonetheless.

I just fail to see a challenger with such bad favorables ultimately beat a longtime incumbent. Kentucky voters are angry at Mitch right now, but with so few undecideds left, it is not clear to me that they will pull the lever for a man that they don't like much more, if at all, even if he does not have that uppercase 'R' next to his name on the ballot. I should be fair and note that if Rasmussen's most recent poll is right, Lunsford shaved 10 points over of his aggregate negative split, and is now nearly equal on that score (albeit still down in that poll by seven points). So maybe he is improving on that score.

All of this is kind of the opposite of Jim Martin in Georgia. Martin might not be as well known in the Peach State as his opponent, but his favorables are much stronger in the aggregate, and that is in great part why his chances are better than Lunsford's, in my humble opinion.

The second key reason I see McConnell pulling this contest out is because Barack Obama will have far few coattails for Lunsford than he will for Jim Martin. Indeed, whereas Georgia's black population is close to 30 percent, blacks make up only around seven percent of Kentucky's populace. Additionally, Obama has been much more competitive in Georgia (the RCP average has him down only 50-45, and gaining), while in Kentucky he has been consistently down by double digits (RCP finds the composite here to be a less manageable 54-41).

Combined with his poor favorable numbers, I just don't think Lunsford will win this one on November 4, though it will be close, much closer than Mitch McConnell imagined when Ben Chandler and Crit Luallen declined to run for the seat. But given the national environment and McConnell's own poor numbers, I would not bet my beloved Xemex watch on it.