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May 15, 2010

So Alley's Ahead Now, Maybe ... But Is Any ORGOPper Really Strong?

Again cribbing from BlueO, but also from DubDub, we find that those ornery suppporters of The Nice Republican might actually be polling more strongly than those of The Suit, the remainder being split between the other two passengers in the ORGOP 2010 clown car and, of course, good old Un Decided. The numbers, as reported by both sources, from Eugene's Lindholm, run thusly:

• Allen "The Nice Republican" Alley: 29 percent
• Chris "The Suit" Dudley: 26 percent
• "Wild Bill" Sizemore: 8 percent
• John "Lt. Gov" Lymm Lim: 6 percent
• Un "Don't Know" Decided: 29 percent

That's, as been remarked anon, one big undecided. And the margin if plus or minus 5 percent, so the best you can say for sure is that Dudley and Alley are ooping along in a dead heat.

But then I looked at the numbers, and realized that Dudley, Alley, a bizarre hybrid of Lim and Sizemore (too bizarre to picture, really) and "Dunno", the opinion field – recent trends in opinion not withstanding – is very nearly split into four easy and equivalently large pieces.

Given that the ORGOP has been hemorraging members for years, and now trails in membership in Oregon everywhere that counts (statewide OrDems count almost 900,000 members where ORGOPpers number only about 670,000) aren't we still essentially figuring out whose going to lose to Kitzhaber in November? The GOP in Oregon is fighting over equal slices of a smaller pie.

I mean, yay for Alley, a pollster says he's ahead, but within the margin of error. He'd still have a hard time beating undecided! The only threat I see here is the legend of a unity of GOP opinion – such a creature as that is.

Now, when I do look at trends, as the Lindholm graph shows starkly, I do see one interesting thing: The undecideds show a steep drop over the polling period, and the only candidate that shows any remarkable trend upward is … The Nice Republican, Allen Alley. Compared to those two trends, Dudley seems flat.

I'm hardly that good at punditry, but I'll go out on a limb and say this much: more undecideds are impressed by Allen Alley than are by Chris Dudley. Which means I'll have to give your rank-and-file ORGOPper credit for knowing a dog of a candidate when they see one.

For now, that's all I'll give them.

People wonder why Republicans don't win major office in Oregon anymore.

I don't.

Posted by The Chinuk at May 15, 2010 10:32 AM