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Has Brad Carson fallen behind in Oklahoma?

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 14th, 2011 at 06:00 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Carson Fought

By request, we look at a 2012 House race today. PPP polled Oklahoma’s second district for the Friends of Brad Carson. Carson, a Democrat, of course won this seat previously in 2000 and 2002, giving it up in 2004 in a failed Senate run. Dan Boren, also a Democrat, won the seat in 2004 and has held it ever since. Boren is retiring, so Carson wants to run.

Is he in good shape, like PPP says he is?

PPP polled both likely general election and primary matchups. Republican George Faught does better against Democrat Ken Corn, but trails Carson 43-35 (MoE 3) among registered voters, for a 9% chance that Faught leads Carson. For an open seat in the abstract, that’s a fine starting point for a candidate, to be in the position Carson is in there.

However this isn’t just any seat, and Carson isn’t just any candidate. Carson previously won this district twice and while it’s not technically the same district in 2012 that it was in 2002, it’s rather close. After the lines were redrawn for the 2000 census, Carson won the second district 74-26 in 2002. Further, Dan Boren has won the district by wide margins: 66-34, 73-27, 70-30, and in the Republican wave year 2010 he still won 57-43.

So for Carson to poll only 43% in a district he won last with 74% of the vote, and that the Democrat last won with 57%, should not in fact be considered great news. Especially if Carson has much better name recognition than Faught has, which is likely but not published in this classic one page memo style internal poll.

The poll, having been commissioned by the Carson team, is likely to have a voter model determined by the Carson people. And possibly as a result, this sample of 1,074 registered voters contains “644 Democratic primary voters.” Whether such a high level of partisan energy actually exists for the Democrats in this district remains to be seen.

Crossposted from Unlikely Voter

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COMMENTS

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  • irishfreedomfighter

    It’s likely to be a somewhat close race, based on Carson’s name recognition, but I see the Republican winning by about 10%, give or take a little, barring some sort of scandal.

  • gawken

    A few weeks after losing his 2004 Senate bid, Carson appeared on one of those post-mortem election panel discussions on C-span. Carson lost… primarily because Bush swamped Kerry in Oklahoma; even though Carson was popular in his district, there was no way he was going to get 40% of Sooner voters to split their ballots.

    Carson was obviously still somewhat miffed at his loss, so during the discussion he uttered the following statement, which I consider among the more revealing and incisive ever uttered:

    “The Democrat party will NEVER again be a truly NATIONAL party until the LAST Vietnam-era protestor has died off.”

    Note: The emphases are mine. I am probably paraphrasing, just slightly, from memory, but believe I have it just about verbatim. It’s stayed with me since then.

    Wonder what Brad will have to say when he loses his House race next year.

  • freemanja1991

    But lets hope that libs swamp the dem primary, and get Corn in there instead of Carson.

  • redtillimdead

    Who else did PPP test other than Faught? Ken Corn is a Democrat, and that was the Democratic primary

  • edintexas

    It’s been almost 40 years since I moved across the Red River, but Little Dixie is still in the 2d District. Has Carl Albert country changed in political view all that much, or has the population of “Green Country” increased enough to overcome the “Life Long Democrat” vote from the southern half of the district?

  • Papabile

    1. This district is not your typical D district.

    2. This is also Coburn’s old district by and large.

    3. Carson went and spend time at Harvard after losing the Senate. I can’t wait to see ads run about that.

    4. Carson was linked at the hip to Obama. Those ads will go over great too.

    5. If the D’s are smart, they will run another D.

  • Gandalf

    No way a Republican wins this in the near future. I used to live in this district, and my parents still do. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, on the local level is dominated by the Democratic Party. Republicans just don’t win anything in this district except for national elections.

    Cherokee Indians have the same political views as African-Americans: They simply won’t vote Republican come Hell or high water. In addition, the conservative Bible-belt types in the area vote Democrat because “my grandpappy voted Democrat and them darn Republicans caused the Civil War and took away segregation”. The entire District is oblivious to the modern world of politics, continuing to vote as if it was the 1950s.

  • http://theminorityreportblog.com Repair_Man_Jack

    Maybe Parker Griffith defecting to the GOP finally broke the “Yellow Dog Democrat” spell here for good.

  • irishfreedomfighter

    gave McCain 66% of the vote in 08′, and Boren beat a severly underfunded challenger with 57% of the vote, and Boren has a magical last name. I’d say the edge goes to us, but it’s a slight edge.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens
  • promise

    some of us “seniors” are in good places to do damage contrl on the blind & deaf of the “seniors”. A friend works w/older americans & is NOT a “D” voter, so is able to educate them in reality! I myself am doing the same, I find great surprise in these people when they find truth!! They do realize the saying “my daddy would turn over in his grave if I voted repubican” as being silly since their “daddy” has been dead for 50 yrs. It holds no water, baby!!!

  • williamjameson

    Polling firms should have similar results if they are honest, this company is usually outside the norms and they admit the poll was majority democrat which makes the poll useless aka liberal bias.

    The real question is do they exclude responses or simply used targeted lists to poll primarily democrats. Useless since they already know most dems will vote against most republicans.

    Wouldn’t surprise me to find George Soros behind the curtain, regardless of whether he funds PPP, they are in bed with unions and with Planned Parenthood and other questionable firms.

    Not a real polling firm, FAUX POLLING.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Polling
    Public Policy Polling (PPP) is an American Democratic Party-affiliated polling firm based in Raleigh, North Carolina.[1][2][3] PPP was founded in 2001 by businessman and Democratic pollster Dean Debnam, the firm’s current president and chief executive officer

    http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/243447/public-policy-polling-or-controlling-jim-geraghty

    Public Policy Polling or Controlling?
    Public Policy Polling is avowedly pro-Democratic; it also prizes its reputation for reliability. Can it continue to juggle these two balls?

    But it is a bit jarring to hear a pollster say, ?We?re absolutely rooting in the race. We don?t want Richard Burr to get reelected,? as PPP?s Tom Jensen declared to Politico last year. (Jensen did go on to say, ?But our reputation is predicated on getting it right, and we?re not going to cook the numbers just to tweak Richard Burr?s nerves. They are what they are.?) Burr is a first-term Republican North Carolina senator who has complained that PPP?s partisan affiliation is largely ignored and that his numbers in PPP?s polls seem strangely low compared to his numbers in other polls.

    Indeed, the PPP client list reads like a who?s who of North Carolina Democratic politics

    It?s not just Republicans who question the firm?s results and accuse it of playing favorites. In February, as the Democratic primary to decide who would run against Burr began heating up, candidate Ken Lewis complained that Debnam had donated $2,400 to one of his rivals, Cal Cunningham.

    http://mediatrackers.org/2011/03/public-policy-poll-overrepresented-union-househoulds-in-poll/
    Public Policy Poll Targets Union Househoulds in Poll

    http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2009/04/our-liberal-bias.html
    Our liberal ‘bias’
    In recent days we’ve been criticized by the chair of the Colorado Democratic Party, Michael Bennet’s campaign manager, Blanche Lincoln, and the North Carolina Republican Party sent out a press release touting our results.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    They do what the client tells them. They disclosed. There’s nothing dishonest about that.