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SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - Democrat Barack Obama is poised to beat out-of-state Republican candidate Alan Keyes for Illinois' open U.S. Senate seat by a virtually unheard-of 3-to-1 ratio, a poll for the Post-Dispatch and KMOV-TV (Channel 4) has found.
The poll results suggest that Keyes' problems go much deeper than just the "carpetbagger" issue.
The poll of 800 likely voters puts Obama, currently a state senator from Chicago, ahead of Keyes, a nationally known conservative commentator from Maryland, 68 percent to 23 percent. They are running in the election Nov. 2 for the Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, R-Ill.
"I can't remember the last time you had a gap like this between two newcomers," said Del Ali, head of Research 2000, the Maryland-based polling firm that conducted the poll last week. "Usually, when you have this kind of gap, it's the popular incumbent against a sacrificial lamb. This may be unprecedented."
More than a third of the poll respondents said the fact that Keyes recently moved to Illinois so he could run for the Senate causes them to be "less likely" to vote for him.
"(Obama) is a local," said poll respondent Eugene Winterbauer, a retired electrical worker from Decatur, Ill. "The other guy, they imported him. I don't like that."
But even more respondents - well over half - simply don't like Keyes. In fact, the percentage of respondents who have a "favorable" view of Keyes (22 percent) was smaller than the percentage who said they hold "no opinion" about him.
The poll is the latest bad news for a party that has had an abundance of it in the past two years. After the scandal-ridden term of former Republican Gov. George Ryan, the once-dominant Illinois GOP lost the governor's office and Legislature in 2002; lost its original Senate nominee this year to a sex-club scandal; and now appears all but certain to lose its one U.S. Senate seat, a loss with national implications in Congress.
Former GOP nominee Jack Ryan (no relation to George Ryan) left the Senate race in June, after the release of divorce documents showing that his ex-wife, television actress Jeri Ryan, had accused him of tricking and coercing her into attending "bizarre" sex clubs in New York, New Orleans and Paris.
Obama, meanwhile, gave a well-received keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston that solidified his support among Illinois Democrats and has garnered praise from around the country.
The new poll suggests Obama's stature hasn't waned since the convention. Respondents gave him a "favorable" approval rating of more than 60 percent, which is significantly higher than the approval rating given to relatively popular Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich in the same poll. Just one in four Illinois voters said they don't like Obama.
With the Illinois GOP's major names unwilling to step in and take on the Democratic Senate candidate, the party took a huge gamble and invited Keyes to move here from Maryland and run. Keyes - a two-time presidential candidate and widely known conservative firebrand - accepted last month, promising "a battle like this nation has never seen."
Since then, he has delivered that fight, but in a way that apparently has turned off even many Illinois Republicans. Keyes has been in the news repeatedly for controversial comments in which he compared Obama to a slave owner because of his support of abortion rights; appeared to suggest that individuals shouldn't be barred from owning machine guns; and called Republican Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter a "selfish hedonist" because she is a lesbian.
Those controversies apparently are part of an intentional strategy. Keyes told a private gathering of Republican fund-raisers this month that he intended to continue making such statements as a means of getting free media coverage, to offset Obama's financial advantage in the campaign, according to a Chicago Tribune report. Citing unnamed sources, the newspaper said Keyes told the gathering he planned to make "inflammatory" statements "every day, every week" until the election.
"This is a war we're in," one unnamed source quoted Keyes as saying, according to the newspaper. "The way you win wars is that you start fires that will consume the enemy."
Keyes has certainly started some ideological fires lately, but the new poll indicates he's the one getting burned by them.
Even poll respondents who identified themselves as Republicans give Keyes less than a 50 percent approval rating. When asked who they would vote for today, just 48 percent of Republicans named Keyes - while almost one in five Republicans are defecting to Obama. Meanwhile, independent voters - crucial to any Republican victory in Illinois - are backing Obama almost 4-to-1.
"Basically, (Keyes) has driven away what is the core Republican base," said Kent Redfield, political scientist at the University of Illinois at Springfield. "Being from out of state makes him unacceptable to some voters ... (and) the way he's been running for office has driven voters away rather than attracted them. He has taken every position and pushed it to the logical extreme, he has taken every controversial stand he can, and it's turning people off."
That view is borne out by Republican poll respondents like William Fleischman, a Galesburg, Ill., salesman who is supporting President George W. Bush this year. "I'm a Republican, but Mr. Keyes doesn't trip my trigger - a guy who moves into the state like that," said Fleischman. "I'm probably more likely to vote for Mr. Obama, just because he's here."
For the first time in U.S. history, both major-party Senate candidates are African-American. Critics have alleged that part of the reason the GOP chose Keyes was to help blunt Obama's advantage among black voters.
If that was the strategy, it apparently has failed. The poll indicates that just 2 percent of Illinois' black population is backing Keyes.
The Research 2000 Illinois Poll was conducted by telephone Tuesday through Thursday. The poll's margin for error is 3.5 percentage points, which means that any individual number could be that much higher or lower.
Reporter Kevin McDermott
E-mail: kmcdermott@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 217-782-4912