One of the more interesting results of the season was Kentucky's gubernatorial race this month.
The Democratic incumbent was term-limited, and Larry Sabato, who is one of the better poll analyzers around, predicted this as a lean toward the Democrat, state Attorney General Jack Conway. Nate Silver expressed the same opinion, though he hedged it a bit more than Sabato.
Yet businessman Matt Bevin won by a rather comfortable nine points. Of the four polls done in October, the average margin was D +2.
There have been two other gubernatorial elections this year. In Mississippi, incumbent Republican Phil Bryant won by 34 points over truck driver Robert Gray. That was to be expected (Gray really didn't campaign at all), but what was surprising was that Gray, an outsider, won the Democratic primary rather easily.
In Louisiana, Bobby Jindal is term-limited. Louisiana has this bizarre two-tier election process that skips the primaries. If no one gains 50%, then the top two vote-getters have a runoff. This has happened.
That runoff takes place in two weeks. The Democrat leads by 10-20 points in polling, but the analysis is very difficult. This is what Sabato has to say:
Quote:
After Gov.-elect Matt Bevin’s (R) strong victory in Kentucky last week — a nine-point win that surprised almost all political observers, including us — we’re again confronted with a difficult-to-handicap red state gubernatorial race, this time in Louisiana.
There, Sen. David Vitter (R) appears to be trailing state Rep. John Bel Edwards (D) despite the state’s strong Republican leanings. Vitter has been under fire for months for his 2007 admission that he used a prostitution service in Washington D.C. and appears weak in other ways. He won just 23% of the vote in the initial round of voting to edge out two Republican rivals and advance to a runoff with Edwards. While Republicans will try to link Edwards to President Obama — a surefire strategy in any red state — Democrats appear to be successfully tying Vitter to very unpopular outgoing Gov. Bobby Jindal (R). (Supporters of each candidate will quibble with these comparisons: Unlike Obama, Edwards is culturally conservative while Vitter and Jindal are longtime bitter rivals.)
Still, using Kentucky as a precedent suggests a clear outlook: Both states are very Republican at the presidential level, and polls showing Edwards with a solid lead over Vitter could very well be wrong, just like the polls showing Bevin trailing state Attorney General Jack Conway (D) were. The state’s underlying partisan fundamentals strongly favor Republican Vitter, just as they strongly favored Bevin.
Despite this, we’re downgrading Vitter’s chances of winning, moving the state from Leans Republican to Toss-up in advance of the state’s Saturday, Nov. 21 runoff.
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This is a tough one. I don't think Edwards will win by 20, but I have a hard time seeing a Vitter victory based on the polling unless polling has become completely futile (a good thing, really).