Good polling news still means bad news for Boasso

The good news for gubernatorial candidate Democrat state Sen. Walter Boasso is that his support for the job leapt 150 percent in the past couple of months. The bad news is that 2.5 times nothing is still nothing and five-sixths of everything for his main competitor leaves him very much on the defensive in this contest.

Boasso’s poll puts him at 21 percent in the race after a $1.3 million advertising blitz. Problem is that trails frontrunner Republican Rep. Bobby Jindal who barely has spent any money at all and who just formally started his campaign by 31 points who went from 62 percent, according to the released results. That still would give Jindal the outright win.

Curiously, the over-time comparison of results had undecided voters increase by half to 21 percent, bringing that figure up from its unusually low level five months prior to the contest. This likely represents soft supporters for Jindal, who recognized his name and little else and gave previous support on that basis, detached by Boasso’s media blitz. That’s not good news at all for the recent returnee to the Democrats because this result shows the floor for Jindal support is right around the majority mark.

Besides the fact that Boasso spent big and could not even reduce his gap to Jindal who spent little by half, and that Jindal still has a majority, news for him will get worse if New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin launches a quixotic campaign for the office. The poll under-sampled blacks (who are most likely to vote for Democrat Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, who the poll showed losing a third of his small support, under the current lineup) and thus overstated Boasso’s support somewhat, but if Nagin actually gets in, by these numbers Boasso will lose the most and almost guarantee his inability to make a general election runoff, if Jindal even lets it come to that.

So while there’s good short-term news in the poll for Boasso, with little to cheer about previously, the long-term picture still remains grim for him or anybody else other than Jindal for this fall.