Poll: Hurt has six-point edge over Perriello
Republican nominee Robert Hurt has a six-point lead over Democratic incumbent Tom Perriello in a new poll of voters in the Fifth District congressional race.
The Roanoke College poll gives Hurt a 46 percent-40 percent lead over Perriello. Independent Jeffrey Clark polls 1 percent of the vote, with 13 percent undecided.
The poll includes interviews conducted with 567 likely voters in the Fifth District between Oct. 5-14. The poll has a margin of error of +/- 4.1 percent.
A look inside the numbers suggests little room for Perriello to make up the gap. Undecideds do lean to Perriello, but only by a 19 percent-16 percent margin. Eighty percent of the undecideds said they are very likely to vote, and trend toward being moderate or conservative in their outlook.
“These results suggest that it will be very difficult for Rep. Perriello to retain his seat,” said Dr. Harry Wilson, the director of the Institute for Policy and Opinion Research at Roanoke College. “Perriello has to hope for a very large turnout among the core Democratic voters as well as the so-called ‘Obama voters.’ That said, the race is certainly not yet over.”
More information, methodology, the questionnaire and all frequencies are available at http://roanoke.edu/News_and_Events/Campus_News/2010_Roanoke_College_Poll.htm.
Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Story courtesy WhenVirginiaWasBlue.com.
Money race tightens in Fifth
Republican challenger Robert Hurt actually slightly outpaced Democratic incumbent Tom Perriello in the money race in the third quarter, raising $900,000 to the $810,000 raised by the congressman, though both seem well-positioned for the final weeks of the race in terms of their access to cash.
“While Robert Hurt continues to take thousands from K Street lobbyists and companies that outsource American jobs, Tom Perriello has received a huge outpouring of support from thousands of working families in Virginia. Powerful special interests like the health insurance companies and oil billionaires are working desperately to get Robert Hurt in Congress because they know he will be a rubberstamp for their agenda. Our grassroots funding base is helping us fight back,” Perriello campaign spokeswoman Jessica Barba said.
Not to be outdone on the statement front was Hurt campaign manager Sean Harrison.
“Our campaign has seen a tremendous outpouring of support from 5th District voters,” Harrison said. “Central and Southside Virginians continue to line up behind Robert’s positive message of creating jobs by lowering taxes, reining in government spending, and reducing the size and scope of the federal government. These contributions will help us combat the hundreds of thousands of dollars Congressman Perriello is receiving from national liberal groups like George Soros’ MoveOn.org and big labor bosses as we work to put an end to the job-killing, big spending Pelosi-Perriello agenda.”
Story courtesy WhenVirginiaWasBlue.com.
WhenVirginiaWasBlue.com: Perriello goes after Hurt on jobs
Republican nominee Robert Hurt has a hole in his jobs platform on free trade.
“Robert Hurt is a typical politician who remains so out of touch with the experience of working families that he doesn’t even realize the devastating effects free-trade agreements have had on the Fifth District. Now he’s even pledging to continue supporting these bad trade deals and protecting corporations that ship good American jobs overseas,”said Jessica Barba, spokeswoman for the Tom Perriello campaign.
Link to column on WhenVirginiaWasBlue.com.
Hurt pledges to defund health-care reform: Good politics, but is it good policy?
Robert Hurt’s move to sign the DeFundIt.org pledge to pull funding from the health-care reform measure passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in March is good politics. It’s probably also bad policy, but you could say that policy is the province of those who are good at politics first.
“By signing our pledge, Hurt has taken a leadership position in calling for the defunding of ObamaCare as the first necessary step to fully repealing and replacing this unconstitutional, job-killing, fiscal train wreck. Americans and Virginians would have a friend in Congress with Robert,” said Alex Cortes, a one-time Bob McDonnell campaign staffer-turned-chairman of DeFundIt.org.
Attempts made by AugustaFreePress.com to reach the Hurt campaign for comment on the move by the Fifth District Republican congressional nominee to sign the pledge were unsuccessful. Lise Clavel, the campaign manager for Democratic incumbent Tom Perriello, did issue a statement to the AFP on the Hurt pledge.
“Robert Hurt’s dangerous plan to defund the health-care reform law would put health insurance companies back in charge of your care, raise prescription drug costs for seniors, increase costs on small businesses, allow insurance companies to drop people’s coverage when they get sick and allow them to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. Virginia’s hard-working families won’t stand for it, and Tom will fight to make sure they don’t have to,” Clavel said in the statement.
Whether or not Republicans could be successful in squelching the reform effort by defunding it is immaterial as far as the November elections are concerned. The move isn’t aimed at initiating a policy discussion, but rather at pushing what the GOP thinks will be a hot button with voters in the fall.
“Opposing the health-care bill and the process that led to it here in the Fifth District is pretty good politics,” University of Virginia Center for Politics analyst Isaac Wood said. “You have people here upset not only with the final bill, but with the way that it was conducted. For the most part, a lot of people felt that you didn’t have a great degree of transparency in the process, that Obama in particular had promised transparency when he ran in 2008. As a result you have a lot of people who are upset and basically want to go back to square one. That’s where this idea of either repealing it or defunding it originates from.”
The effect of this early move by Hurt is Advantage: Hurt, to Wood’s reasoning.
“One of your main goals at the outset is to decide the turf on which the battle will be fought. That’s what you’re seeing the Hurt campaign starting to do here,” Wood said. “They know the issues that they want to talk about, and one of them clearly is health-care reform. it may not be the most salient issue anymore. People’s passions may have cooled somewhat since the March vote, but still, for the most part, the politics is on the Hurt campaign’s side of this issue. Some of the public opinion has turned more positive about health-care reform in general, but in this district, I’d expect that you’d find a great many voters still upset, and the degree to which that becomes a key issue in this race could really benefit Robert Hurt.”
Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Poll: Hurt has big early lead over Perriello
Republicans need the Fifth District to take back control of Congress. The Fifth appears to be the GOP’s for the taking, according to a Survey USA poll released on Tuesday.
The poll has Republican challenger Robert Hurt leading Democratic incumbent Tom Perriello by a 58 percent-to-35 percent margin. Independent Jeffrey Clark polls 4 percent.
Hurt, a state senator from Danville, leads in most of the major demographic areas – among meny by a 19-point gap, among women by 26 points, among independents by 11, and even among the 18-34 cohort that was key to Perriello’s success in 2008 by a whopping 32 points.
Perriello didn’t poll well in his ’08 upset of GOP incumbent Virgil Goode, trailing by as many as 35 points as late as August in one Survey USA poll before knocking off Goode by 727 votes on Election Day.
Link to the poll internals: here.
Edited by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
What does early Perriello money lead mean for November?
You look at the money race in the Fifth District, and it’s no race at all, really. Democrat Tom Perriello has $1.7 million in cash on hand while his Republican opponent, Robert Hurt, has $212,000, according to reports filed by the respective campaigns with the Federal Election Commission.
Those numbers are bound to change between now and November, sure, but it’s not hard to see Hurt, a state senator from Danville, facing down a huge disadvantage in resources for the duration.
The idea that Democrats are floating around now is interesting, if nothing else – that maybe national Republicans who have been talking up the race in the Fifth as one of their targeted races in the 2010 midterms will be inclined to look elsewhere with the Hurt campaign sputtering out of the gate. Read more
Poll: Hurt leads GOP race in Fifth
Edited by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
State Sen. Robert Hurt appears to be breaking away from the crowded field of candidates for the Republican nomination in the Fifth District. Read more
