Before we get into the guts of this latest poll which shows that John Kennedy is going to win re-election without a runoff next month, we should say a little something about the polling outfit that conducted it. The thing is, Democrat pollsters are absolutely notorious for cooking their surveys to produce the results they want. That might be true of Republicans as well, but on the other hand in the last few election cycles it’s been GOP pollsters who’ve come a lot closer to real results than the Democrats.

There’s a reason for this, which is that Republican pollsters are trying to measure public sentiment. Democrat pollsters are trying to shape it.

One of the most notorious of these guys is an Alabama-based pollster named John Anzalone, who runs push-polls contracted by left-wing advocacy shops and also for a lot of Democrat candidates in red states who have little chance to win. Anzalone’s polls will often consist of skewing a sample pretty badly toward the Democrats and then telling respondents every awful thing they could ever know about the Republican in a given race and then asking for a response, and when the numbers come back rosy the poll is used to fleece donors in blue states out of campaign cash.

“Our guy can win! Look, see? Here’s a poll showing it!”

That works, a little. It rarely produces a victory, but it does generate some money. And since these guys don’t make widgets or sell real estate, they need to pull in some dead presidents some kind of way. The grift is as good as any.

Another polling outfit, Public Policy Polling, is similar to Anzalone. They’re a bit more respectable, but not much. And what PPP is famous for is slanting their polling to produce the results they’re looking for. A few years ago we had a perfect example of that here in Louisiana…

PPP, which is a left-wing outfit specializing in lots of push-polling and other Democrat electioneering disguised as opinion surveys, conducted a five-question survey to 274 Louisiana Republicans from Aug. 16-19, ostensibly asking for those respondents’ presidential primary choice between Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan and Susanna Martinez.

A sample of 274 people is virtually useless with that many options available.

But the real question PPP wanted an answer to was this:

Who do you think was more responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina: George W. Bush or Barack Obama?

This, of course, was a cheap shot. If you ask the vast majority of Louisiana Republicans to identify the leader most responsible for the Katrina response you’re going to get Kathleen Blanco and Ray Nagin as the answer. Replacing those two on the ballot with Barack Obama so that the only choices available are Bush, Obama or “not sure” is malpractice, and mean-spirited malpractice at that.

And of course, PPP got more or less what they were looking for out of that poll. Because 28 percent of the respondents said Bush was more responsible than Obama, 29 percent said Obama and 44 percent saw through the question and answered “not sure.”

It’s a trick bag, of course. Given the ridiculous structure of the question, the only answer you could give was that Bush, who was in office at the time Katrina hit in 2005, bears more responsibility than Obama. The question was designed to force Louisiana Republicans to trash the former president in “It’s Bush’s fault” fashion.

So with that as prologue we now have this…

The first major poll by a national firm to gauge the lay of the land in Louisiana has John Kennedy blowing out his competition in the midterm elections, which take place in just under a month.

Just as surprising, Democratic candidate Luke Mixon is polling ahead of Gary Chambers as the two battle it out for a chance to send Kennedy into a runoff.

https://twitter.com/Midterm22/status/1580114865473351680?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1580114865473351680%7Ctwgr%5Ed6131b735f5d44a4eb76e1be112697862ca1e2ca%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fkpel965.com%2Fsen-john-kennedy-louisianas-senate-poll%2F

And if you want an indication of how this went, there’s this…

There’s always something like Q8 when PPP does their surveys, in that they’re push-poll questions designed to weaken support for Kennedy and increase it for the Democrats in the race. But in this case it was a massive fail, because the numbers didn’t move at all following their push-poll question…

Chambers picked up a percentage point for some reason following that push question, which is funny since it was directly taken from Mixon’s messaging.

What to make of this finding that Mixon is ahead of Chambers? Well, we’re not sure. It’s a good indication that Chambers hasn’t galvanized the black vote like he’s been hoping to. PPP found that among black voters Chambers is pulling just nine percent of the vote, compared to Steib’s 17 percent and Mixon’s 29, while Kennedy is actually getting 14.

That’s a disaster, and if these numbers are to be believed it would signify that the ultra-woke, combative jackass campaign Chambers has been running is not the secret sauce that leads to black Democrats taking their party over. It didn’t work to get Karen Carter Peterson into Congress before her sins found her out and ended her political career, and it won’t make one for Chambers.

Not to mention Chambers is catching just five percent of the white vote. Even with all the aggressive abortion stuff and smoking a blunt in his campaign ads he can’t pull any white people.

We’re not sure we believe these numbers, because our opinion of PPP couldn’t be much lower. They’re saying the sample was 41 percent Democrat and 35 percent Republican, which is an oversampling of Democrats (Democrats are 39.5 percent of registered voters and considerably less than that in terms of identifying voters) and possibly an undersampling of Republicans (33.3 percent of registered voters but a lot larger percentage of identifiers), and given that the sample was 65 percent white and 30 percent black, not to mention 56 percent female and 44 percent male (by registration it’s a 55-45 female edge; so it isn’t a large oversample of females), one wonders if they didn’t load the box with white female Democrats to get Mixon’s numbers up.

But at 16-9, it’s still likely that Mixon has pulled ahead of Chambers. Which would be exceptionally amusing, and if that ended up being a real number it would probably be the end of his road politically, at least as a candidate for elected office.

What that would do for the idea that black Democrats are finally going to take over a party they’re 60 percent of the registered voters in, we don’t know. It probably requires some leadership to pull that off and frankly, we’re not sure where you’d find it if Chambers is going to face-plant as badly as PPP’s numbers suggest.

Either way, it doesn’t really matter. Kennedy is walking away with the race and that’s always been true.