Public Policy Polling (6/12-13, likely voters, 4/1-5 in parens):
Alexi Giannoulias (D): 31 (33)
Mark Kirk (R): 30 (37)
LeAlan Jones (G): 14 (NA)
Undecided: 24 (30)
(MoE: ±4.2%)
Let’s start with the good news: Mark Kirk seems to have gotten badly damaged by the continued pile-up of discrepancies in how he’s described his military service. Kirk’s 7-point erosion from the April poll in which he led is a substantial drop. (I’d say he’s fared much worse than Richard Blumenthal, if we want to talk false equivalence, but I suppose Blumenthal has also suffered about 7 points worth of damage… he just started out with a 30-point lead, so he can afford to absorb a few blows.) The drip-drip-drip is still continuing for Kirk too, with the Pentagon now confirming what documents leaked to Nitpicker first revealed: that he was cautioned twice for mingling politics with military service, and had to sign a waiver before serving on active duty in Afghanistan. Only 10% of PPP’s sample thinks Kirk has been “truthful about his military record,” with 45% saying no and 45% unsure.
Now for the bad news: Alexi Giannoulias is such a flawed candidate that he seems woefully unable to capitalize on Kirk’s self-inflicted damage. In fact, he too lost ground since the most recent poll, suggesting that while the Broadway Bank kerfuffle is receding in the rearview mirror, it’s still weighing on voters’ minds. While Kirk’s favorables are now a terrible 23/31, Giannoulias puts up an identical 23/31.
Now switching back to good news: Giannoulias’s decline seems, at least in part, due to the introduction of a new variable, the Green Party candidacy of LeAlan Jones. Third wheels rarely perform as well on Election Day as they do in early polling, especially when they’re an option in a close race between two candidates who require a lot of nose-holding (see Chris Daggett in last year’s New Jersey gubernatorial race as Exhibit A). Since those Green Party votes would likely break in Giannoulias’s favor, the large Green vote here is actually something of a positive sign. Throw in the new developments that we discussed yesterday with the likely third-party right-wing candidacy of Mike Niecestro, who isn’t polled here and whose votes are likely to come almost entirely out of Kirk’s column, and you can see a rather clear path to victory for Giannoulias — even if it doesn’t involve him breaking 50%.
The Green then got more than 10% but I have a hard time seeing a path to victory for Kirk if Niecestro is serious.
Lisa Madigan must wake up every morning kicking herself. Talk about a missed opportunity.
Look at the crosstabs (which PPP makes public, no subscription wall), and you’ll see Page is pulling fairly evenly from right, left, and center alike, indeed slightly more from the right than the middle or left. So Page is a generic anti-major party alternative, not drawing from the left.
Moreover, I don’t think it’s a valid poll to include Page at all. I never heard of Page before today, nor had I heard the Green Party was fielding a candidate in this one. Nor do I know if this is the only 3rd-party or independent option on the ballot. If there’s also a Libertarian and other minor parties and independent candidates, then a valid poll should have listed none of them or all of them, not just Page. Realistically, the poll should have been a 2-way. Not that the results would have been different, because I bet we’d still see a one-point race either way, but with Kirk and Giannoulias in the mid-30s or even high-30s instead of the low-30s. But still, including Page was really a bad move.
I do think Niecestro will matter if he really makes the ballot and really has and spends the money he claims to have.
I’m actually confident Giannoulias has a 50-50 shot in a 2-way against Kirk, but with a right-wing 3rd wheel, I’d say Alexi is a prohibitive favorite to win.
To my dad last night, saying that it was basically a race between two candidates that are both slimy and that nobody likes. Looks like my assessment was 100% correct.
It’s a shame that it had to come to this for Team Blue, there should have been SOMEBODY out of our enormous bench in Illinois that wasn’t tainted by scandal to take the plunge. Madigan is the name everybody brings up, but what about our house delegation? Why didn’t Melissa Bean or Jan Schakowsky or Luis Gutierrez run for the seat? You have to figure the seat would be safe, at worst likely with any of them. This race is a disaster, a completely preventable one at that. Uggh.
Or is the only negative against Alexi is that his family bank, that he had no hand in, kinda failed. I mean, if this qualifies as “slimy”, it is essentially blaming Giannoulias on something he had no control over, and lets be fair, that is kinda a low blow.
Democrats hate Alexi. I for one am not very fond of him at all but I would still suck it up and vote for him. I know my sister is voting green and she even sucked it up to vote for Blago in 2006. I have tried to talk her out of it but she seems pretty dead set on it. Illinois has a strong green base, the strongest in the country I think, and while this poll may be on the high side I would not at all be surprised if the green got 10+%. How serious is the Tea Party guy? Can he self finance, could he pull 5-10% of the vote?
LeAlan Jones is one of the two kids featured in NPR’s 1993 documentary, “Ghetto Life 101,” produced by David Isay. I’m glad he’s doing well but there is no way he will pull more than 5 percent of the vote.