Posted on 10/24/2004 8:14:20 AM PDT by Non-Sequitur
Democratic Rep. Dennis Moore has seized a 12-point lead over Republican challenger Kris Kobach in the race for Kansas' 3rd Congressional District, a new poll shows.
With a little more than a week left in the race, Moore is getting support from about 50 percent of the district's voters, a benchmark that some strategists think will be hard for Kobach to overcome.
The poll of 600 registered voters likely to cast a ballot on Nov. 2 showed Kobach with 38 percent support, while 11 percent of voters were undecided. The margin of error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Both candidates took comfort in the random telephone poll conducted by Market Research Institute of Mission for The Kansas City Star and KMBC-TV from Oct. 16 through Friday.
Kobach embraced the poll, noting that surveys during the Republican primary showed him trailing ex-fighter pilot Adam Taff with a high number of undecided voters. He thinks that undecided voters in the general election will swing the race in his favor.
“I am delighted with those results. That's exactly where we want to be at this stage,” Kobach said.
“Those results show that it is anybody's game, because undecideds tend to break very heavily for the challenger.”
Moore said the poll results showed that he was drawing from a broad spectrum of voters — Republicans, Democrats and independents.
“People want and appreciate somebody who's going to try to look at things on an issue-by-issue basis and not vote a straight party line,” he said.
Eighteen percent of those polled who identified themselves as Republicans said they were supporting Moore.
Fifty-seven percent of the poll's respondents were women, a heavy representation.
Women voters outnumber men and tend to be more active at the polls.
The poll indicated that Moore did better among women, 53 percent to Kobach's 35 percent. Among men voters, Moore was leading 46 percent to 42 percent.
Moore's lead is significantly larger this year than in 2002 or 2000, when The Star conducted polls showing him in tight races with Taff and Phill Kline, now Kansas' attorney general. Polls then showed Moore with less than 50 percent and with leads of only 2 or 3 percentage points.
The margin in the new poll surprised some experts, who think the race will ultimately be much closer than the margin indicated in the poll.
But if Moore is already at 50 percent, it is not a good sign for Kobach, they said.
“You would clearly want Moore to be under 50 at this point,” said Johnson County Republican strategist Kevin Yowell.
“I would not say that this race is over, but Kobach is going to have to get busy if he's going to pull this out.”
The poll shows that Kobach's message of fighting terrorism and preserving moral values by opposing abortion and gay marriage is important to some voters.
Of the voters who listed terrorism as the most important issue in deciding their vote, about 69 percent said they supported Kobach. Among voters who cited moral values as a key issue, 68 percent supported Kobach.
However, the poll showed that Kobach was failing to appeal to voters on a number of other issues, such as the economy, education, the war in Iraq and health care.
Moore received support from 65 percent of those who cited the economy as most important, from 69 percent who cited education and from 58 percent from those who identified Iraq as key.
Christy Ostmeyer of Overland Park said she was voting for Kobach, largely because of his opposition to abortion. She believes that morals play a big role in how politicians vote on issues.
“Most politicians want to walk the line and say, ‘I am personally opposed, but I'm not going to stand up and tell other people what they have to believe,' ” she said.
Todd Nelson, 32, of Overland Park said he was voting for Moore. He said he thought Kobach was skewing the terrorism issue to make it unfairly appear that Moore wasn't doing anything about it.
“I don't particularly feel afraid as far as terrorism goes,” Nelson said. “I feel like Kobach is manipulating that issue.”
Allan Cigler, a political science professor at the University of Kansas, said Kobach had made no apparent attempt to move off his conservative message to appeal to more moderate Republican voters. He said the poll indicates that strategy appears to be backfiring.
“I think his strategy of just appealing to his base is apparently not working. The base is not as big as he thought it was,” Cigler said.
The Kobach campaign has banked part of its strategy on registering new, independent voters who might be more inclined to vote Republican, Cigler said.
Moore said the poll showed he was drawing support from all segments of the district, which covers Johnson and Wyandotte counties and part of Douglas County.
It also indicated he was doing well with independents, getting about 59 percent of those surveyed.
And of those who registered to vote in the past six months, Moore was getting support from about 49 percent.
I certainly would not trust any "poll" from this source. Except for a very few small town exceptions, all of the major papers and paper groups in Kansas are rat/socialist mouthpieces.
I suggest you bookmark this thread. We'll reassemble two weeks from Wednesday to see how accurate they were.
No, I think I'll stick around for a while.
BS BS BS Don't you believe it hehe
Why not?
*ping*
Hmmmmmm ................. I think this'll be close but those last few % are always tough.
No kidding... I just read through his posts on a number of threads. Wacko...
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