Hello fellow snowed-in Dems,

Welcome back to the 2010 Election Watch with your brilliant, exquisite, and utterly incomparable board members Matt and Bridgit! Today, we look at the complex Senate race currently underway in the great state of Kentucky, home of amazing basketball, Mitch McConnell, and fried chicken. Now you might be asking, why are you two blogging about Kentucky? That’s a Republican state, it went for John McCain, Mitch McConnell is from there, and its a terrible time for Democrats! It’s not going to be close, right? Wrong! Kentucky is actually a Democratic leaning state, with 57% of registered voters aligning with the Democrats, compared to only 36.5% who align with the Republicans. In addition, both the Governor and Lieutenant Governor are Democrats, as is the Speaker of the House. To even further this point, Kentucky voted for Democratic Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton (twice). In fact, Kentucky voted for the winner of every Presidential race from 1964 through 2004, only losing that streak in the 2008 election when it went for McCain.

Kentucky has become one of those states, such as West Virginia, that is full of conservative Democrats and likes to elect Dems to state offices, but then vote for Republicans in national elections. Luckily for us, the Democrats have a very strong field in the election, and are looking to turn this seat blue. The seat is being vacated by two-term Republican Senator Jim Bunning, a baseball Hall of Famer and a man prone to horrific political gaffes, who was essentially forced into retirement by the Republican party, which saw him as a weak candidate (he barely survived reelection in 2004, winning 51% of the vote compared to Democrat Daniel Mongiardo’s 49%). Currently, the Democratic primary has two real candidates, one of them being Lt. Governor Mongiardo. The other is current Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway. Conway is young and emphatically defeated his Republican counterpart in the race for Attorney General, leading many Democrats to believe that he too would be a very strong candidate.

The Republicans, unfortunately, also field a strong primary, with many candidates who will surely do better than the incumbent would have done. Two strong candidates have come forward, the first being current Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, who actually used to be a Democrat and actively campaigned for Bill Clinton in the state, which has worried some conservatives. The other major candidate is Rand Paul, son of infamous Libertarian congressman Ron Paul of Texas. Paul has never been in government, but did found the Kentucky Taxpayers United, a “nonpartisan” but ideologically conservative organization that ranks Kentucky’s representatives on how the raise or lower taxes. Both candidates have pledged to keep conservative values in the Senate, which is hugely important to the voters of the state.

Kentucky’s primary election is on May 18, and thus far no candidate has been able to gain a substantial lead over his rival. A late December poll has Conway up by 4 points over Mongiardo in the Democratic race, and on the Republican side a recent poll has Paul up by 19 points, but only 3 months before that Grayson was up by 15, so we’ll just to have to wait and see how that race turns out. In putting the four candidates against each other, the Republicans are winning every time, with the biggest spread being Grayson versus Mongiardo (Grayson is up 9 on average) and the smallest being Paul versus Conway (Paul is up 3 on average). In any case, this race is much closer than many Democrats expected, and we believe that the Dems have a fighting chance to win this seat, which would be huge considering the losses we may be taking in other places (North Dakota, so sad). This is a race where TV time, money, and volunteers are going to be hugely important, so expect the Obama machine to come out in full force to try to take this seat. Hopefully we can do it! We believe!

Next Week: Colorado (Will this new liberal-leaning state stay with the Dems?)

I don’t always get political, but when I do, I prefer the Democrats. Stay liberal my friends.