Poll Shows A Dead Heat In Indiana Senate Race
Will Indiana Republicans come to regret tossing Richard Lugar earlier this year? Time will tell, of course, but for the moment at least Richard Mourdock, the Tea Party backed candidate who beat him, is in a tight race with Democratic nominee Joe Donnelly:
The U.S. Senate race in Indiana remains a dead heat between Democratic Congressman Joe Donnelly and Tea Party-backed State Treasurer Richard Mourdock.
The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in the Hoosier State finds Mourdock earning 42% of the vote, while Donnelly draws support from 40%. Three percent (3%) prefer some other candidate in the race, but another 15% are still undecided.
Given that this is Rasmussen, which typically skews Republican, that’s a significant number. This is the first poll of the race since March, when a DePauw University poll showed the race tied 35-35. Obviously, the high number of undecideds here means the race is still up for grabs. But considering this is typically reliably Republican Indiana.
On the Presidential side, Rasmussen shows Romney ahead of Obama by 16 points, a strong suggestion that this state is going to be back in the Republican column in November. Again, as with the Senate race, there has been very little recent polling in the Hoosier State.
Ofa has installed a fair amount of staff in thia state considering there is no way its going for Obama. I think the only reason for obama spending money in this state is because of the Senate seat.
It’s fun to remind Republicans that they would already have the Senate majority if not for Tea Party candidates in Delaware and Nevada. If the Tea Party didn’t exist, Obamacare would not have been passed.
Nobody loves seeing Tea Party senate candidates on genneral election ballots more than Democrats.
Where Tea Party candidates who’ve primaried the Republican incumbent from the right run into problems tend to be in state-wide races in purplish states. Deep red House CDs and deep red states tend to send these folks through pretty easily, but purplish states have been where we’ve seen this blow up in their faces.
I know there are counter-examples (LePage in Maine, for example), but to me, this seems to the general rule.
Actually, LePage is a bad counter-example. There was a term-limited Dem Governor before.
Difficult to believe that any Democrat could win a major federal election this year in Indiana, but if Donnelly does beat Mourdock the greatest irony therein would be that the so-called “Tea Party” folks won’t be able even to grasp the irony, and that will be the case even if as a result thereof the GOP falls one seat short of a Senate majority.
>It’s fun to remind Republicans that they would already have the Senate majority if not for Tea Party candidates in Delaware and Nevada.
Republicans in 2010 came within four seats, not two, of a Senate majority.