With just two weeks until Election Day, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has regained a slim 1-point lead over his Kentucky challenger, Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes,
The Courier-Journal reports.
A new Bluegrass Poll shows the U.S. Senate race extremely tight, with McConnell hanging on to a 44 percent to 43 percent advantage over Grimes, Kentucky's secretary of state. The results are well within the poll's margin of error.
Two weeks ago Grimes had a 2-point lead over McConnell, but that poll was released before Grimes awkwardly refused to answer whether she had voted for President Barack Obama for president. Libertarian candidate David Patterson had 5 percent support.
"The Bluegrass Poll has swung back and forth all year long and has never given either candidate a reason to let up," said
WKYT political editor Bill Bryant.
The poll was conducted for WKYT-TV, The Lexington Herald-Leader, The Louisville Courier-Journal, and WHAS-TV.
The survey of likely voters was conducted from Oct. 15-19, and has a margin of error of 3.9 percentage points.
According to the poll, McConnell's favorable rating is 38 percent, his highest number in this category in the past five months. Still, he has a 47 percent unfavorable rating among those polled, compared with Grimes' 43 percent disapproval rating. She has a 40 percent favorable rating.
Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics tells The Courier-Journal that the average of public polls shows the Senate minority leader has the advantage.
"It's moved in McConnell's direction. You have to look at the polling average, given the margin of error, the difficulty of reaching people, and the difficulty of coming up with a good polling model," says Sabato.
The
RealClearPolitics average of the latest surveys gives McConnell a 4.4 point lead.
"The first one may have been too hot for McConnell. The next one was almost certainly too cold, resembling no other polling in the race. This one looks just about right, when compared to other polling data," Stephen Voss, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky, tells
The Lexington Herald-Leader.
Herald-Leader reporters Sam Youngman and Jack Brammer write that the poll reflects that Grimes has lost ground, rather than McConnell gaining momentum.
Just one week ago, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee announced it was not planning on running any more ads on behalf of Grimes, The Hill reported.
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