Ken Cuccinelli Erases McAuliffe Lead Despite Dollar Disadvantage

Ken Cuccinelli campaigned this past Saturday with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, while Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, a libertarian favorite, are set to join him in the final days. The visit by Ron Paul, as well as visits from his son Senator Rand Paul, are clear indications they are making a serious effort to pull votes away from Libertarian Robert Sarvis.

The latest Emerson College poll showing McAuliffe’s lead evaporate down to 2 percent, also showed Sarvis polling at 13 percent, which could easily tilt the election to Ken Cuccinelli if they are successful. In the most recent Quinnipiac poll, which will release their final at 6:00 A.M, only 6 in 10 Sarvis voters say they will surely vote for him, but that notoriously translates into lost support.

“With the race this close, the final decision by the roughly one in 10 voters who are supporting Libertarian Robert Sarvis has become even more critical. Nationally, third-party candidates often lose support in the end as voters enter the voting booth and back someone they consider the lesser of two evils,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

According to the Hampton University poll, Sarvis supporters favor Cuccinelli as their “second choice” by a 2 to 1 margin. When asked, 43 percent of Sarvis supporters say they’d vote for Cuccinelli if Sarvis were not in the race, while 24 percent say they would vote for McAuliffe if Sarvis were not in the race, and 33 percent say they don’t know for whom they would vote.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who is nothing short of a conservative hero, is helping Ken Cuccinelli turn out his base, while appealing to independents.

At a rally on Saturday, Walker said that Democrat Terry McAuliffe will be in the pocket of “big government union bosses” if he wins the Virginia governor’s race, which is pretty indisputable considering the I.O.U. report from the Washington Post. Walker said, “Do you want someone who is going to side with the big government labor unions,” he said at one of two stops ahead of Tuesday’s off-year election, “or do you want to someone who will stand with the taxpayers of the commonwealth?”

“State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is nipping at Terry McAuliffe’s heels as the race to be Virginia’s next governor enters the final week of the campaign,” said Brown. “It goes without saying that turnout is the key to this race and the harshly negative tone of the campaign is the kind that often turns off voters.”

The Chief of the Virginia Board of Elections said turnout could be as low as 30 percent of registered voters, and both the Cuccinelli and McAuliffe campaigns expect no more than 40 percent turnout for the ceiling. Given the momentum and the political fallout over ObamaCare, it is wholly possible the polling has yet to catch up to the actual votes on the ground.

That said, because of Ken Cuccinelli enjoying huge enthusiasm driven by anti-ObamaCare sentiment, polling momentum, and the fact Democrats are very worried that black voters won’t come out for a white liberal aristocrat, People’s Pundit Daily is changing the Virginia governor race rating from “Leans Democrat,” to “Toss-Up” (View PPD Governor Races And Ratings Map).

(Note: While I still see McAuliffe with a slight advantage, the race has shifted considerably, and it is foreseeable that advantage may be erased or even reversed before polling ever picks it up. Sarvis slipping will have a huge factor if it doesn’t get arrested, but this late in the game, it appears Virginia may do what they frequently do to third-party candidates, which is dump them in the last minute.)