If you haven’t seen it yet, SD News Watch has started to trickle out poll results for their most recent poll. And it is not looking good for Dan Ahlers. At all:
Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden leads Democratic challenger Dan Ahlers 56% to 36%, according to the latest South Dakota Poll sponsored by News Watch and the Chiesman Center for Democracy at the University of South Dakota.
The Oct. 12-14 survey of 500 likely voters by Mason-Dixon Polling and Strategy, ranked as one of the least-biased and most-factual pollsters, also found that 51% of independents support Ahlers, while 35% support Rhoden and 14% of independents are undecided.
But here’s the part that caught my attention the most. The name ID portion of their poll results:
An incredible 35% of the polled had no idea who Dan Ahlers is. “Don’t recognize” is a bad thing if you’re running for Governor. It’s even worse when this is a man who served 3 terms in the legislature and ran for US Senate just 6 years ago. Yet he can’t even break 70% on his name ID?
Wow. Dan is certainly not a bad or offensive person. But if you think about it, the resources to fight a campaign is a ticket-wide problem for Democrats. The simply lack the resources to make their candidates competitive. This has been a problem for the Democrat party for over a decade. And when they have the opportunity to make hay – in a year when it’s a mid-term for Republicans, and the Republican President’s actions have driven gas prices through the stratosphere, this was a year when they could have captured a flag or two. But they are flat busted.
Democrat did it to themselves when they put their efforts away from party building into spending their capital of time and money on ballot issues years back. They’ve never really recovered.
Of course, the Republican Party has fallen in that trap – abandoning candidate promotion in favor of ballot measures – so eventually it will happen to us down the line. The most candidate promotion they’ve done so far this election is when the chairman wore a Heather Baxter t-shirt when doing the last gun drawing Sunday for the only major fundraising effort of the current chair’s tenure. I seem to remember it was just 4 years ago when the GOP used to do slate postcards. Now a dim memory.
Republicans can take some glee in the Democrats’ missed opportunities this election.
Unfortunately, unless some things change, that could all too easily be the SDGOP in a coming election.