Note: In the original story we misspelled the name of U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rounds, we apologize for the error.
Could the Democratic Party’s infusion of funds into the South Dakota Senate race hurt Michelle Nunn’s campaign here?
With South Dakota polls showing Republican Mike Rounds losing ground to independent Larry Pressler and Democrat Rick Weiland, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee announced a $1 million boost for Weiland. Earlier, the Democratic establishment had withheld money from South Dakota, according to media reports.
The shift to South Dakota could mean fewer funds for Nunn in Georgia, where spending from outside groups recently tapered off, the AJC reported.
Meanwhile, the Ending Spending Action Fund announced a $2 million ad campaign against Nunn, the Washington Post reported. With the conservative PAC vowing to keep firing until election day, Nunn sorely could use extra support from the national party.
While the South Dakota developments drew a flurry of national attention, Nunn also received favorable coverage after a SurveyUSA poll for 11Alive News that showed her in a virtual tie with Republican David Perdue. The poll showed Perdue with 46 percent of the vote, and Nunn with 45. Libertarian candidate Amanda Swafford received 3 percent, with 6 percent undecided.
SurveyUSA showed Perdue holding 77 percent of conservative voters, with Nunn keeping 87 percent of her base. Perhaps the strongest sign for Nunn was the finding that she leads among moderates by 22 points.
Salon politics writer Luke Brinker in a Friday article titled “Is Georgia the next Senate curveball?,” saw a potential “game changer” in Perdue’s statement in a deposition that he spent most of his career as a CEO outsourcing jobs, as originally reported by Politico.
The New York Times’ Nate Cohn in his Upshot blog, which Brinker also referenced, said that “recent polls are most likely underestimating the share of voters who are black, along with Ms. Nunn’s share of the vote.”
The 2010 electorate was 66.3 percent white and 28.2 percent black, according to figures from the Georgia secretary of state cited by Cohn. Cohn expects the 2014 electorate to be about 64.2 percent white and 28.8 percent black. However, recent polls showing Perdue leading assume a 25.7 percent black share of the electorate.
Nunn received another boost from poll-watching guru Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog. The 11Alive News poll prompted the site to raise Nunn’s chances of winning from 26 percent to 30 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten. For the first time, the site forecast Perdue to receive less than 50 percent of the vote, 49.9 percent.
A SurveyUSA poll also triggered the South Dakota frenzy for Democrats. The poll showed Rounds leading Pressler by a narrowing gap of 35 to 32 percent, with Weiland falling behind by 28 percent.
Although a former Republican senator, Pressler supported President Obama in 2008 and 2012 and could possibly caucus with the Democrats if he wins the election to replace incumbent Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson, who is retiring. If Pressler gains more ground on Rounds, Weiland could slip in to win.
The Democrats were cheered by other good news. In Kansas, independent Greg Orman maintained his lead over incumbent Republican Sen. Pat Roberts, which led the Sabato Crystal Ball web site at the University of Virginia to switch its rating from “toss-up” to “leans independent.” Orman, who has not said which party he would caucus with if elected, gained control of the race after the withdrawal of Democratic candidate Chad Taylor.
The Sabato poll also changed its South Dakota rating from “likely Republican” to “leans Republican.”
North Carolina Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan, whose gains led Sabato to move the state to “leans Democratic” two weeks ago, bolstered her lead over Republican Thom Tillis.
But in Kentucky, Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes undercut her strong poll numbers against incumbent GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell by refusing to answer whether she voted for Obama. She dodged the question three times in an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal editorial board.
Embattled Louisiana Democratic incumbent Mary Landrieu fired her campaign manager. In Iowa, Republican Joni Ernst looked to be building her lead over Democrat Bruce Braley. Democrats struggled in Alaska, Colorado and Arkansas.
The Republicans need to gain six seats in the election to take control of the Senate. With the landscape constantly shifting, “where it all will end knows God,” as New Yorker writer Wolcott Gibbs said in a 1936 parody of Time magazine and its backward-running sentences.
