Republican George Allen and Democrat Tim Kaine are in a statistical dead heat in the U.S. Senate race, according to the latest Quinnipiac University poll.
Forty-four percent of those polled chose ex-Gov. Allen and 42 percent chose ex-Gov. Kaine, with a margin of error of 2.9-4.4 percent.
This is the fourth time a Quinnipiac poll had similar results, meaning the race could go down to the wire, WAMU 88.5 reported.
The poll also found New Gingrich (30 percent) leads Mitt Romney (25 percent) among Republican voters in the commonwealth, but Romney fares better against President Barack Obama. Forty-four percent of polled voters said they would vote for Romney over the incumbent, who got 42 percent. Paired against Gingrich, Obama leads 46 percent to 41 percent.
*In 2008, Obama became the first Democratic candidate to take the state in a presidential race since 1964, but according to regional RNC, the Q poll shows the state could be turning red again. Fifty-one percent of voters disapprove of the job Obama has done, compared to 42 percent who approve, and 53 percent say he doesn’t deserve a second term, while only 41 percent say he does.
Maybe more importantly, 42 percent of Republicans are enthusiastic about the 2012 presidential elections, compared to just 29 percent of Democrats.
*The Washington Post’s Tom Jackman noted Gingrich, who is holding a rally in Arlington Wednesday night, bought a house in McLean in May 2000 and has voted in McLean in every general election since 2002.
So if Gingrich were the Republican nominee against President Obama (who recently opened an Arlington office), how might the McLean resident do in his home state of NoVa? In Arlington County and Alexandria City, where Republicans are elected as often as I-66 is uncongested at 9 a.m., he would get crushed. In Loudoun, where Republicans recently swept every seat in the Board of Supervisors election, he would win handily. In Prince William, where Obama won 58 percent in 2008, he would be the underdog.
And in Fairfax, Gingrich’s home turf? The Democratic presidential vote has increased in every election since 1980, to Obama’s 60 percent in 2008. Obama likely can’t pull that number again. But Gingrich would still be a heavy underdog, despite his McLean ties. Regional pride in Gingrich almost certainly would not boost him in the State of NoVa. Or elsewhere, actually, since ties to the Washington area are generally not something to brag about in the rest of the political world.
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(R-34th District) touted Allen as the better Senate candidate for the economy in an OpEd in Gingrich’s hometown Patch. She pointed out his 2010 budget proposal that was rejected 97-0 in the House of Delegates.
So after having his tax increases rejected in Virginia, Tim Kaine now has endorsed the highly partisan Washington big taxing and big spending agenda of the current Administration. He still defends the $800 billion stimulus bill which never yielded the “shovel ready jobs” it promised but did raise our national debt while national unemployment has stayed over 8% for almost three years. (Fortunately, Virginia, with our job friendly policies, has had a considerably lower unemployment rate of between 6 – 6.5%.) In the midst of these still trying economic times, Tim Kaine also advocates raising tax rates on tens of thousands of Virginia families and small businesses, which puts him to the left of where the President was just last December when he said the current tax rates should stay in place.
*Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s proposed budget continues to get slammed as far education. The Virginia Education Association said the proposed budget increase for K-12 is historically low. VEA noted that while there are about 45,000 more students, K-12 schools would be running on less than what was appropriated in fiscal year 2009.
