Tag: MS-Sen-B

Talk about being tone deaf: Roger Wicker’s campaign says that all of Mississippi’s job losses due to his votes in favor of NAFTA and CAFTA are actually a good thing!

“Roger Wicker is for free trade, because it allows us to take our low-skilled, low-paying jobs like textile manufacturing, and replace it with high-skilled, high-paying jobs like Toyota.”

Stuck in hard times, Mississippi? Why, just go grab yourself one of them newfangled high-skilled, high-paying factory jobs! Don’t all y’all know that they’re growing on trees thanks to Roger Wicker’s courage?

Our friends at Cotton Mouth expose the hypocrisy:

Roger Wicker is attacking Ronnie Musgrove for losing manufacturing jobs even though total employment stayed about even.

But here his spokesman says that it is good that Mississippi is shedding “low skilled” manufacturing jobs.

Crumb-bums will be crumb-bums.

Rasmussen (8/21, likely voters incl. leaners, 7/28 in parens):

Ronnie Musgrove (D): 43 (43)

Roger Wicker (R-inc): 52 (52)

(MoE: ±4.5%)

Without leaners, Wicker leads by five: 47-42. The crosstabs show Wicker making some important gains over earlier polls: he now scores 17% of African-American voters (10% without leaners) and holds Musgrove to only 22% of the white vote. Even with a sky-high African-American turnout in November, that’s a winning formula for the GOP.

I don’t mean to be a Debbie Downer here, but Musgrove has some serious challenges — most seriously, a recent guilty plea from a business executive who admitted that he attempted to bribe Musgrove with a $25,000 campaign contribution in connection to a failed beef plant project — an unsuccessful business venture that left Mississippi taxpayers carrying the tab in 2003.

Now, there’s no evidence of any wrongdoing on Musgrove’s part, but this is clearly the type of smoke and mirrors game that the GOP will love to exploit. I’m not saying that this race is undoable, but it’s going to take an extraordinary amount of sweat.

SSP currently rates this race as Lean Republican.

A sampling of some of the latest campaign ads cluttering the airwaves:

Rasmussen (7/28, likely voters incl. leaners, 6/24 in parens):

Ronnie Musgrove (D): 43 (47)

Roger Wicker (R-inc): 52 (48)

(MoE: ±4%)

Without leaners, Wicker’s lead shrinks to six: 48-42. So what’s changed since last time? It’s hard to say that anything major happened, unless perhaps Wicker’s many ads are starting to sink in. That said, the DSCC has begun airing ads on Musgrove’s behalf in recent weeks.

More interesting are the racial breakdowns of the poll, which Rasmussen is including in its crosstabs for the first time: Wicker leads Musgrove by 70-21 among whites, but trails Musgrove by 83-3 (yes, three) among African-Americans. Unfortunately, we still don’t know how Rasmussen is weighting their sample make-up.

While the poll shows Musgrove down from his past strength among white voters (which was around 26% in the most recent R2K poll of this race), Wicker’s extremely low performance among black voters has got to be a serious concern if he hopes to manage a spike in turnout among such voters in November, with Barack Obama on the top of the ticket.

SSP currently rates this race as Lean Republican.

Research 2000 for Daily Kos (7/21-23, likely voters) (5/22 in parentheses):

Ronnie Musgrove (D): 44 (42)

Roger Wicker (R-inc.): 45 (44)

(MoE: ±4%)

Not much movement in Mississippi, but it shows a very close race. And one that will probably stay close the whole way through, dependent largely on how much extra African-American turnout is generated by Obama’s coattails.

How big are those coattails? The same sample says McCain is beating Obama 51-42. That’s up from 54-39 in the previous poll, and more importantly, up from the 59-40 margin from the 2004 presidential election.

From Roll Call:

As Sen. Roger Wicker (R) continues to air a series of campaign ads in central and Gulf Coast Mississippi this month, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is going up on television in the Magnolia state beginning today.

The DSCC television purchases in Mississippi means the party will be on the air in the Magnolia State ahead of the Democratic Senate nominee, former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, who has yet to buy television ads in the special Senate election.

No word yet on the nature of the ad or the scope of the buy, but it appears that the DSCC is not willing to let Wicker have the airwaves to himself while Musgrove works to build up his war chest. We’ll have more details on this one as we get ’em.

Rasmussen (6/24, likely voters, 5/27 in parens):

Ronnie Musgrove (D): 47 (47)

Roger Wicker (R-inc): 48 (46)

(MoE: ±4%)

Musgrove still pulls even with Wicker despite having a poorer favorability rating (47-43 to Wicker’s 56-32), probably due to Musgrove being better known as a former Governor. Still, Wicker has begun putting his healthy cash-on-hand lead to good use by airing ads in Southern Mississippi, where he is largely unknown.

Here’s a bright spot from the poll which might give us hope for Mississippi’s future: Voters between ages 18-29 favor Musgrove by a whopping 68-27 margin. Wow. Conversely, voters 65 years and older prefer Wicker by a 60-34 margin. Let’s hope that Barack Obama’s candidacy can energize young Mississippians.

Bonus finding: Speaking of Obama, McCain still only has a 50-44 lead in Mississippi.

UPDATE: (by Crisitunity) The same poll also covered incumbent R Thad Cochran vs. ex-state rep. Erik Fleming in MS-Sen-A (the regularly scheduled Senate election). No surprises: Cochran is up in that one, 59-32.

Is Haley Barbour regretting his ploy to schedule the special election to replace Trent Lott in November? Some political observers in Mississippi are already calling it a potentially huge blunder:

“This may have been the worst decision he’s ever made,” said longtime political analyst Dr. Marty Wiseman.

That’s because former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, a Democrat, has emerged as competition in the November vote, and perhaps more significantly, Barack Obama last week wrapped up the party’s presidential nomination.

“I think Musgrove has had turnout fall into his lap,” added Wiseman, the director of the Stennis Institute for Government at Mississippi State University. “The Republicans have had it since Haley came back to the state, but Obama has taken care of that.” […]

Wiseman and Atkins agree the significance of Obama’s candidacy on the Senate election will be a turnout tsunami of blacks, who traditionally have voted Democrat but have not been accustomed to heavy voting in Mississippi or national elections in recent years because of Republican dominance.

Similarly, David Hampton over at the Jackson Clarion-Ledger argues that Barbour may have “outfoxed himself” with by insisting on the Nov. 4 date, and not realizing that a Barack Obama candidacy could excite the state’s African-American Democratic base like never before.

Over at Daily Kos, SSP’s DavidNYC famously laid out the blueprint for a narrow Barack Obama win in Mississippi, but the same plan (with perhaps some slight tweaks) could be used for Ronnie Musgrove’s road to victory. It is worth mentioning that the Obama campaign, according to a recent NY Times article, is planning on greatly expanding the electoral college battlefield, and has even made inquiries about advertising rates in Mississippi.

But even without Obama directly contesting the state, it’s very likely that the state’s African-American population, at 37% of the state, will be very energized anyway. This is going to complicate things for Roger Wicker.

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Food For Thought

Rasmussen (5/27, likely voters):

Ronnie Musgrove (D): 47

Roger Wicker (R-inc): 46

(MoE: ±4%)

According to the poll, Musgrove has a 49-42 favorable/unfavorable rating, while the lesser-known Wicker is sitting on a 49-32 favorable rating.

So let’s tally ’em up.  Last week, we saw a DSCC internal poll that had Musgrove up by 8 points, and a Research 2000 poll that had Wicker up by 4.

However, in the “too good to be true?” file, Rasmussen’s same round of polling shows Barack Obama in a surprisingly close race with McCain, only down 44-50.

In the state’s other Senate race, between longtime incumbent Thad Cochran and former state Rep. Erik Fleming, Cochran leads by 58% to 35%.

Research 2000 for Daily Kos (5/19-21, likely voters):

Ronnie Musgrove (D): 42

Roger Wicker (R-inc*): 46

(MoE: ±4)

The last time Markos commissioned a poll here, Wicker led Musgrove by a 47-39 margin.  However, it would be a bit deceptive to put those results as trendlines.  As Markos noted at the time, his December poll heavily undersampled African-Americans.  They made up just 9% of his December poll sample, while their real share is closer to 35% of the Mississippi electorate.  So if you re-weight that poll, Musgrove was actually leading in December — by a considerable margin.

So while this poll doesn’t show the eight point Musgrove lead that one of the Musgrove campaign’s internals showed earlier this week, it indicates a close race.  

For now, Musgrove has the advantage of a statewide profile, which is something that Wicker is still working on.  Here’s one area for Musgrove to consolidate some support: he currently leads among black voters by 73-9.  He’ll need to push that to at least 90% (preferably higher) on election day.