Up is down in this cycle’s Senate race in Missouri.
Secretary of State Robin Carnahan (D), the scion of a legendary Show Me State political family, was trailing Rep. Roy Blunt (R) by 13 points in a Time/CNN poll released earlier this month.
The results were just the latest in a string of bad polling news for Carnahan. Around that time, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee pulled out of the state, and Carnahan’s prospects haven’t gotten any better in recent days: She continued to trail, 46 percent to 41 percent, in a Public Policy Polling survey released on Monday.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, Democrats say. With anti-incumbent sentiment running high across the country, Carnahan’s proven ability at the polls and home-state connections were supposed to make for a rare pickup opportunity for Senate Democrats this cycle.
But the fiscal crisis and her family ties haven’t seemed to help.
“The party in power pays a high price when there’s rough economic times,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). “It’s harder to assume the mantle of an outsider when you are from a family who is so well-known.”
Yes, Democrats reckon, President Barack Obama lost there last cycle, but Carnahan won twice statewide in 2004 and 2008.
Plus, she was running this go-round against a Republican nominee who theoretically could be cast as the quintessential Washington, D.C., insider: A former No. 3 in House Republican leadership, Blunt is married to a registered lobbyist and he sits on the board of trustees at the Kennedy Center.
Blunt also was a top lieutenant to contentious former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), whose rocky tenure and proximity to jailed GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff earlier this decade still make him a favorite target of the Democratic Party.
“If this were almost any other year, Robin Carnahan would roll over Roy Blunt,” said Steve Glorioso, a veteran Democratic political consultant in the state. “He’s got more baggage than a FedEx plane.”
Carnahan’s campaign has attempted to make Blunt’s Capitol Hill tenure the foremost in voters’ minds, but that strategy has apparently yielded only marginal results.
In one recent television ad, a narrator calls Blunt “the very worst in Washington.”
Glorioso said Carnahan’s campaign may have overestimated just how effective it was to merely beat up on Blunt and his wife for their job descriptions.
“I still don’t concede that it’s over, but too much of their attacks have not explained why his corrupting of the system has hurt average Missourians,” Glorioso said.
A Missouri GOP consultant agreed that Republicans, too, are surprised at how effortless Blunt has been able to beat the moniker. The source speculated that cynical voters make little distinction between his Washington, D.C., connections and with Carnahan’s well-known political family; politicians are politicians, the logic goes.
“She’s had a very difficult time making those charges stick,” the Republican consultant said. “It’s mainly because of her own profile and her family has been in politics for a half century.”
The Rev. Jesse Jackson appears at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church on M Street Northwest for a pre-rally before a march to the White House to protest what is seen as President Barack Obama's lack of action in addressing a variety of problems in black communities.
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