For the last year, only one nonpartisan polling company, SurveyUSA, has produced results that showed Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes ahead in her effort to unseat Republican incumbent Mitch McConnell. Its latest poll now has McConnell in the lead.
The latest result, released late Monday, has the Senate minority leader ahead just 44-43 percent, well within the poll’s margin of error of 3.7 points. That’s based on a phone poll of 655 likely voters. Libertarian candidate David Patterson has 5 percent.
That would ordinarily be bad news for McConnell because other recent polls have shown him ahead by as many as eight points. So a one-point lead would suggest the race is now tightening as the election approaches. But it may actually signal the opposite because SurveyUSA’s “Bluegrass Poll” has been the main outlier. That it is now falling in line with other polls suggests McConnell’s lead is real.
The Bluegrass Poll is given weight because it is produced for some of the state’s leading media outlets: The (Louisville) Courier-Journal, the Lexington Herald-Leader and the TV stations WHAS-TV and WKYT-TV.
Three previous results gave Grimes a lead between one and four points, according to RealClearPolitics. The most recent poll was on Oct. 10 showing her ahead 46-44 percent with a four-point margin of error. That was based on 632 likely voters reached by phone.
The only other poll that has shown her ahead in the last year was, interestingly a June one by Magellan Strategies, a Republican group. That poll had her ahead 49-46 percent with a 3.5 percent margin of error. That was based on an autodial poll of 808 likely voters.
Every other poll since February, including ones by Democratic groups, has given McConnell the lead, albeit usually a narrow one. SurveyUSA also gave McConnell the lead in polls in July and August, indicating that it is not that much of an outlier.
