Jack Conway is down, his campaign says, but he’s not out yet. The Democratic nominee for Senate in Kentucky is facing a slew of new public polls showing him down by a significant margin to Republican Rand Paul, but his campaign tells me voters are just now starting to pay attention to the race that’s been a top focus of national press for at least a month now. That puts Conway in a good position to pull off the upset win, his campaign says.
“I trust our private internal polls, which put us anywhere…between 2 and 7 points [down],” Conway spokesperson John Collins told me today. “Which is, I think, where we want to be: within striking distance.”
Collins isn’t the only Conway supporter who apparently thinks there’s still a race in the Bluegrass State. Former President Bill Clinton will stump for Conway in Kentucky on Monday, just a day before voters make their choice.
Public polls make Clinton’s push and team Conway’s read a little tough to swallow — but not impossible. New robopolls from SurveyUSA and Rasmussen as well as a new live telephone survey from a Kentucky cable channel show Paul with a healthy lead ranging from about eight to around 12 points. The last polls from the three, taken a few weeks ago, showed Paul with a lead from 2 to 11 points.
The TPM Poll Average shows Paul leading 49.5-42.5.
That’s not a bad place to be if you’re Paul and your opponent has been running ads about Aqua Buddha and that time your Bourbon County coordinator assaulted an unarmed MoveOn activist on camera.
But Collins says it’s also not an awful place to be if you’re Conway and you’re running in a state where President Obama’s approval rating hovers somewhere around 37%.
“This is, of course, a challenging environment,” Collins said.
I asked Collins if he thought the tack the Conway campaign has taken with Aqua Buddha and the Kentucky stomp could be helping Paul in the end. Polls have shown the voters really didn’t care for the Aqua Buddha talk, which was based on stories about Paul’s time as an undergraduate at Baylor University, and it appears that Paul has completely weathered the storm created when Conway brought it up. The tale of a young Paul allegedly tying up and blindfolding a woman, putting her in a creek and asking her to pray to “Aqua Buddha” has become campaign legend this year, but some say the embarrassing story actually made life easier for Paul in the end.
Collins seemed to dismiss that idea, and said that most voters are just waking up to the vote they’ll be casting next week, and that means that the race is still up for grabs. That could mean they’re just getting to know Paul as the stomper hits political airwaves.
“People are just tuning in this week,” he told me. “And I think that they’re seeing a pretty clear choice.”
“Jack’s gonna be in a pretty good position Nov. 2,” Collins added.
