The death spiral of Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy’s Senate career continues, according to a new poll. Worse for him, there’s little he can do about it.
The firm Quantus Insights released results polling the contest, where he faces major challengers for the GOP nomination in the forms of Treas. John Fleming and Rep. Julia Letlow, from earlier this week. They show Fleming at 34 percent, Letlow at 25 percent, and Cassidy at 20 percent, leaving another 20 percent or so undecided.
It’s hard to shoot the messenger on this one. The firm isn’t affiliated with a campaign – not that this disqualifies such a poll, for as long as the protocol (question orderings and their wordings and answers) is unbiased, the sampling frame reasonable and sufficiently large, and the contact methods of respondents can produce that desired sampling frame, it (barring unhappy randomization, i.e. a bad sample) will produce valid and reliable results for the population of voters – and this appears to be a quality poll (although a bit vague on the specific sampling procedure and claiming it captured “likely” voters, including those unaffiliated that historically have voted for Republicans as both GOP registrants and those registered without affiliation may participate in the primary, without spelling out that procedure). Unless it drew that one-out-of-twenty bad sample, this is reality.
Accordingly, Cassidy remains in deep trouble by the numbers. Worse for him, it would take a monumental effort by him to reverse this, as the poll’s internal numbers show. Worst of all, none of three different strategies from what he has been doing will succeed in accomplishing this.
While the poll didn’t ask about candidate knowledge numbers, we can assume name recognition for Cassidy is close to universal, and that a substantial majority have heard of Fleming and Letlow. This creates a tremendous anchor around his neck, because two-thirds have an unfavorable view about him, and almost half say a primary reason in their voting choice is to replace him, while another fifth who didn’t say that said that would be the case if he made the runoff depending on who is his opponent.
Thus, a strategy of getting GOP voters to switch to him will fail. A largely positive campaign, such as (selectively) emphasizing his actions in the Senate and ties to popular Republican Pres. Donald Trump (84 percent approval of him), will not work to overcome this inertia. This means he must continue to bash others, which in reality means Letlow. His immediate problem is to get into the runoff, and it’s easiest to pull just a few points from your closest rival instead of many more from somebody farther ahead that leaves the closer candidate relatively unaffected. As well, since they are closer ideologically to each other than to the very comprehensive and consistent conservative Fleming, Cassidy should have an easier time siphoning off voters from Letlow, who his campaign and its surrogates already have gone after on ideological and ethical grounds.
But this has a built-in limitation. Slinging mud may detach a voter from a candidate, but then it’s another matter to grab that voter. These could head to another candidate or just roll off and just don’t vote. In this instance, the best he could hope for would be roll off, given his high unfavorability, which is less efficient than snatching the vote. On the “liberal Letlow” charge, that just pushes the many bummed-with-Cassidy voters determined to find an alternative into the Fleming column. The ethics publicity (Letlow reported very late some stock transactions) just invites those with which that resonates who are less enamored with Fleming but also not enamored with Cassidy either to suck it up with Fleming (some) or stay home (most).
Another strategy seeks to capture the roughly fifth of voters declaring themselves undecided, for capturing them disproportionately can vault into a runoff. Still, there’s Cassidy’s unfavorability that may discourage snaring them (unfortunately, the poll doesn’t break down by vote intention, which would give a definitive view of how the undecided crowd rates candidates and reveals their demographics). And, as it is, among unaffiliated voters the undecided portion isn’t much higher, at 24 percent, than it is for Republicans, at 21 percent.
A final strategy would hone in on unaffiliated voters, trying to expand the electorate rather than shuffling around existing chunks, under the presumption that they are disproportionately likely to vote for him. A corollary to that would be for the deep-pocketed campaign to conduct very expensive operations designed to get registered Democrats to switch to unaffiliated more than 30 days prior to the May 16 election, on the theory that as Democrats will nominate a token candidate, they will want to choose the lesser of what they see as the “evils” of the GOP candidates for that party’s nominee’s eventual coronation in the general election.
But, again, there is his high unfavorability where just over half of unaffiliated voters – which the sample presumes will comprise about 14 percent of primary voters – think of him unfavorably. Plus, if he runs a campaign that touts supporting conservative policy preferences (while ignoring those less conservative) as especially Trump-backed items, this presumably doesn’t appeal that much to the unaffiliated voters as a whole and especially not to Democrats. Even with a great amount of swag in the bank to blitz the airwaves, he can’t publicize himself as all things to all voters. Finally, unaffiliated voters are significantly less likely to vote in a primary election, reducing that pool; in fact, a large portion of unaffiliated undecided voters at present can be expected not to vote.
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