Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
On Monday, SurveyUSA gave Democrat Alison Grimes some long-awaited good news. On behalf of local news outlets, they found Grimes
leading Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell 46-44, a reversal of the 46-42 McConnell lead they found in late August.
Recent independent polls have been pretty bad for Grimes. In the last few months she has trailed from anywhere from 4 to 8 points. Last week a Grimes poll from the Mellman Group showed her up 42-40; while Mark Mellman has a very good reputation, until now he was the only pollster showing Grimes ahead. The last time Grimes led in a poll was in June, when a PPP survey on behalf of Americans for Tax Fairness showed her up 2. The last time an independent pollster showed her up was in May, when SurveyUSA gave her a 43-42 edge. For their part, McConnell's team is dismissing this as an outlier but they haven't released any contradictory numbers.
It's always good to be skeptical when one pollster finds something different than the rest of the pack. We've noted in the past that SurveyUSA has a tendency to be very erratic. In the last few weeks nothing appears to have happened in this contest to cost McConnell the lead. For now, we should wait until more pollsters weigh in to see if Grimes has in fact narrowed or reversed the gap, or if this is an outlier. In any case, both parties have to spend big to try and win here and that's not likely to change.
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