Is the nine-point Bob McDonnell lead in Thursday’s Washington Post poll insurmountable? Yes and no.
And the yes and no both hinge on one factor. Looking at the poll internals, one thing jumps out at me. More than half the voters surveyed, 56 percent, feel that Creigh Deeds is running a negative campaign. (As I reported last week, a number of state and national Democratic Party leaders feel the same way. But that was “irresponsible” of me to put out there for public consumption.)
Conversely, 60 percent of voters surveyed feel that McDonnell is running a positive campaign.
The Post helpfully offered glimpses into its poll numbers from 2001 and 2005, which showed an interesting trend. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine were viewed by voters in those cycles as running positive campaigns – Warner’s number to that effect registering at 68 percent in ’01, Kaine’s at 57 percent in ’05 – while their Republican opponents Mark Earley and Jerry Kilgore were viewed as running negative campaigns – Earley by 53 percent in ’01 and Kilgore by 67 percent in ’05.
McDonnell got ahead of the game in the spring running wall-to-wall bio ads showing him walking on a beach with his wife and hanging out at home with the missus and the kids anticipating, you have to think, the onslaught on his paleoconservative social-issues voting record to come. The expected blitz took on added oomph with the revelations about McDonnell’s controversial (to say the least) 1989 grad-school thesis that laid out a rather backwards social policy agenda, but the Deeds campaign has to date spectacularly failed to follow up the Taliban Bob message with a shred of OK, so here’s why you should vote for our guy.
The reaction to this line of observation from the Deeds camp – to shoot the messengers for bringing up their failings, to blame the economy and the tenor of the health-care debate and the general bad feelings toward Democrats, to do basically everything outside of taking responsibility for effing the thing up big time – is an indication to me that maybe the race is a note or two from the fat lady being done singing.
There are glimmers of light at the end of the tunnel in the Post poll internals. Tim Kaine is viewed favorably by 60 percent of likely voters, according to the Post, and President Barack Obama, being treated by the Deeds campaign as a vote-killing millstone, is viewed favorably by 53 percent.
It’s hard to think how a Democratic gubernatorial candidate could be nine points back with three weeks and change to go with a sitting Democratic president over 50 percent and a sitting Democratic governor at 60 percent. A TV commercial or two featuring Deeds with Kaine and Deeds with Obama would have to in and of themselves boost his poll numbers. Right?
(Or maybe they drag down the numbers for Kaine and Obama. Hey, one or the other has to be true.)
It would be more helpful, of course, if the Deeds camp would pivot from being hypernegative to, I know this is a revolutionary idea, so bear me out, but maybe give people a reason or two to pull the lever for the good guys.
(And for chrissakes, don’t have it be, Because I’m going to raise your taxes. Whoever thought that bit of genius up should be reassigned to licking the cheap envelopes at campaign headquarters.)
– Column by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
