Rate Kentucky

[ElectionsGuy]

21 day poll (up to ~3 pm on election day). I originally thought of doing a 'who wins' poll but I thought it would be a bit boring.

Still think it's leaning Bevin, but I'm open to changing my opinion in the last few weeks. I'm also open to adding a 'Likely Beshear' option if anybody wants that.

[Politician]

Lean R, a tad closer to Likely than tossup. Inb4 IceSpear

[Frenchrepublican]

Lean R

Bevin wins 50/44

[TrendsareUsuallyReal]

Safe R. The margin will probably be closeish for Kentucky but that doesn’t change the fact there is no realistic way for Beshear to win

[ElectionsGuy]

For comparison sake, here's the same poll I did right after the primary

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=320633.0

[Skunk]

Lean Bevin. The race has definitely moved in his favor to the surprise of nobody.

[Xing]

Safe Bevin, sticking with my prediction of a 54-43 win. Obviously Bevin isn't going to do anywhere near as well as Trump here, but I think we've seen how inflexible a lot of voters are.

[Skye]

There hasn't been a poll since August. Maybe they're afraid of botching it like in 2015.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Tossup/Lean Beshear until another poll comes out

[morgieb]

Lean Bevin. He's still unpopular and the lack of polling means a fair bit of uncertainty about this race, but yeah it looks an uphill battle for Beshear in the current climate.

[Gracile]

Bevin is favored, but I think he'll underperform the party baseline in a big way. I think in the end he'll win in the high single digits.

[Progressive Pessimist]

Strong lean R.

[Pragmatic Conservative]

Tossup/Tilt R, I think this will be closer than many expect. If I had to guess Bevin wins by 2 or 3 points but wouldn’t shock me if he eked out a win.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Strong lean R.

There hasnt been 1 poll since August, its only R at presidential race

[Sir Mohamed]

Lean Bevin.

My prediction is Bevin gets reelected 52-46%.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Being tied in poll isnt bad for Beahear and he got an endorsement for the GOP FOP police dept, nor impossible for Beshear to pull off upset. Bevin has the same approvala as Fletcher

[IceSpear]

Lean Bevin. The race has definitely moved in his favor to the surprise of nobody.

Nobody? I take issue with that assertion.

Titanium R obv.

[Calthrina950]

Safe R. The good people of the great state of Kentucky are rallying behind their savior, Governor Matt Bevin. Beshear will soon be cast into an abyss, and no Democrat will emerge from that abyss, in Kentucky, for years to come. The real question now, is whether or not Bevin will win by low double digits, like Blackburn, Cramer, and Stitt did last year, in supposedly "competitive" races.

[ON Progressive]

Safe R, sadly.

[TDAS04]

Likely Bevin

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Bevin did poorly in the debate; as a result, tossup/tilt D: as a result, doesnt bode well for Leader McConnell.  He can lose against McGrath🤩

[ElectionsGuy]

Changing back to Likely R.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Bevin lost the debate, and Bevin is a weak, ineffective Gov like Ernie Fletcher.  Greg Stumbo and Beshear can both win next month. Leader McConnell can very well lose, as well. KY is only Lean R at the presidential level.  Statewide Dems have won

[Lisa's voting Biden]

KY is only Lean R at the presidential level.

Please, stop posting.

[Fuzzy Bear]

Surprisingly, I'd say Lean Beshear.

The Beshear name is good.  Bevin only won his primary by 52-39-9; not a convincing showing. 

Incumbent Governors have won reelection in these circumstances.  I was an active Democratic Partisan in Democrat Hugh Carey's reelection campaign for Governor in 1978, and Carey won the primary by almost the identical numbers Bevin won by.  Carey was an excellent Governor, but he was a guy whose persona was often prickly, and he alienated his Lt. Governor (Mary Anne Krupsak, an upstate Democrat) and picked up an enemy in State Sen. Jeremiah Bloom (D-Brooklyn), who was passed over for the State Senate Democratic Leadership when Carey was elected, and he never forgot that.  (Bloom did not endorse Carey for re-election.)  NY was nowhere near as Democratic back then as it is now; it was a Lean D state at the Presidential level, but it had strong Republican local governments outside of NYC, and some of the upstate cities (Syracuse, Rochester, Troy, Schenectady) were lean R at a minimum.  It would be fair to say that the overall environment was as favorable to Carey then as it is to Bevin now.

What happened to Carey was twofold:  One, was that he unified the Democratic Party after the primary.  He got upstate Democratic legislators to support him strongly, even though they supported the Death Penalty's reestablishment.  (Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo single-handedly kept the death penalty from being reinstated in NY for 20 years; it was only George Pataki that signed it back into law.)  The other was that Assembly Minority Leader Perry Duryea (R-Montauk), who led for most of the campaign, lost ground toward the end due to some self-inflicted wounds.  (Some of Duryea's anti-NYC statements came back to haunt him, and that swung certain areas of the city that were heavily Democratic, but heavily Catholic in outlook, to come back to Carey. 

So Bevin can certainly win.  The GOP trend in KY is stronger than the Democratic trend was in NY in 1978.  Beshear could well suffer from self-inflicted wounds.  Perry Duryea, on the other hand, wasn't the kind of guy to challenge Nelson Rockefeller (or his hand-picked successor Malcolm Wilson) in a primary in the manner that Bevin once challenged McConnell.  I suppose we'll see.