Quick Hits for Thursday

The Ohio Senate race shows an interesting finding, the Nevada Senate race solidifies, and Georgia gets carpet bombed in today’s quick hits.

A reader asked why Quinnipiac shows both Democrats running about the same against Rob Portman in the Ohio Senate general, despite Lee Fisher crushing Jennifer Brunner in the primary. And it’s true: leading 41-29 (MoE 3.1) and gaining 8 points against Brunner’s losing 2, Fisher’s the commanding favorite right now in the primary, per this poll.

But yet, Fisher leads Portman 40-37 and Brunner leads Portman 40-36 (MoE 2.5). Two polls showing the same results can be a coincidence, but I believe it suggests that Democrats are united against the former Bush administration official. Portman’s favorability rating differences are striking. He’s liked 25-8 overall, 51-1 among Republicans, 22-8 among Independents, and so on across the board. However Democrats dislike him 15-9. So far it appears they’re united to oppose him regardless of the primary winner on their side.

Quinnipiac also looked at our favorite race, the Ohio Governor’s race, and still shows Ted Strickland ahead of John Kasich 44-38. However Quinnipiac results in Ohio come with a warning, though I do expect both the Ohio Governor’s and Senate races to be close down to the wire in that swing state. A fighting chance is all Democrats can ask for in a year like this, and I expect they are happy for it.

Turning to Nevada, the news gets no better for Harry Reid, who can’t break away beyond a narrow range of 40% versus any Republican per Rasmussen. Sue Lowden leads 52-39 (MoE 4.5), Danny Tarkanian leads 51-41, and Sharron Angle is up 48-40.

The strategy Senate Democrats have of using members from Republican leaning states as their caucus mouthpiece seems to hurt those men come re-election time. They may want to return to using Senators from solid seats as they did under leaders like Johnson and Byrd.

Rasmussen also carpet bombed the Georgia Governor’s race. Four Republicans times Two Democrats equals 8 head-to-head matchups to ponder. Forget that. I’ll just estimate lead probabilities and average them for each candidate. Here goes.

Republicans are looking good. They led 7 of 8 matchups. John Oxendine averages a 72% lead probability, Nathan Deal 87%, Karen Handel 68, Eric Johnson 46. One of these numbers is not like the others. One of the four is not the same.

Between the two Democrats there’s also a big gap. Roy Barnes is at a competitive 46 while Thurbert Baker languishes at 19. The best matchup for Democrats is Barnes over Johnson, while for Republicans Deal is cold decking Baker.