Sen. Gordon Smith lags in Oregon polls

Oregon Democratic Senate candidate Jeff Merkley has solidified a small but consistent polling lead over Republican incumbent Gordon Smith in the Beaver State. 

The Democratic Oregon House Speaker has led in a number of polls since Sept. 22 and received another boost with the most recent RealClearPolitics polling average giving Merkley a nearly 4 percentage point lead over Smith, who won his second term in 2002 with 56 percent of the vote.

{mosads}Merkley’s campaign has worked to tie Smith to President Bush, while connecting Merkley with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

“Smith has been a rubber stamp for every single George Bush failure,” said Merkley spokesman Matt Canter. “The election in Oregon has already begun and voters don’t just want Obama. They want to send Obama a senator like Jeff Merkley who will actually deliver the change Americans are demanding.”

Smith was among 10 Republicans to have voted most often against their party’s majority during the 109th Congress and voted in agreement with President Bush 81 percent of the time during that period, according to Congressional Quarterly. He also became an opponent of the Iraq war in December 2006 and has supported a timeline for telling the president to withdraw troops.

Smith’s campaign says its own internal polling shows their candidate with a 4 percent lead and that its position is stable going into the campaign’s last two weeks. Campaign manager Brooks Kochvar said their internal poll surveyed 700 likely voters during the past three days, with a 3 percent margin of error, and found a 46-42 percent edge for Smith.

“We feel like we’re in a good position,” Kochvar said. “Republicans around the country have been taking a hit, and our numbers have not.”

But Bill Lunch, head of the political science department at Oregon State University, is one of several observers who say the wind is at Merkley’s back. The state’s Democratic Party has added 167,000 registered voters to its rolls since January, raising the Democratic share of the state’s voting electorate from 38 to about 43 percent. The GOP has only added 7,000 new voters, and given the overall numbers, has seen its share of the electorate drop from 33 to 32 percent, Lunch said.

Those factors, combined with the wild popularity of Sen. Obama (D-Ill.) in the state — polls show him up by 15 points over GOP rival Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) — are all pointing in Merkley’s direction, Lunch said. While Oregon’s economy hasn’t been hit as hard as California’s or Washington state’s, recent job-loss announcements in Portland and Eugene haven’t helped the GOP outlook.

“The underlying terrain in the political universe here is shifting in ways that are pretty clear toward the Democrats, so the polls showing a lead toward Merkley are not a surprise,” he said.

The turnaround has been swift; for most of this year, Smith was widely assumed to be safe in his bid for a second term. He has carefully positioned himself as a centrist. Those stances appeared to pay off, as polls over the summer showed Smith with double-digit leads. But a Portland Tribune poll in mid-September gave Smith only a 3 percent lead, and a Sept. 15 Rasmussen poll showed him only one point ahead.

Merkley turned the corner in a Sept. 22 Survey USA poll that gave him a 2 percent lead over Smith, and three of four polls since then showed him slightly ahead. An exception was an Oct. 14 Rasmussen poll that showed the race tied, although Merkley’s campaign says that poll did not include Constitution Party candidate David Brownlow.

Kochvar downplays Brownlow’s potential as a spoiler for Smith and touts his candidate’s bipartisan record — the campaign has posted ads highlighting Smith’s work with Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) on hate-crime legislation, with Obama on renewable energy initiatives and with Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) on affordable housing bills.

Smith also has not been without his share of plaudits, including the endorsement Friday by the Portland Oregonian, the state’s largest-circulation daily newspaper.

Lunch said Smith’s positioning will likely have at least some success, but that far more powerful trends are working against him.

“There are some Democrats and independents that will vote for Obama and Smith. The question is, how many?” Lunch said. “If the polling we’re getting is accurate, in a variety of ways the shift is to Democrats up and down the ballot, not just in the voting registration but voting patterns. It’s been a slow, gradual, evolutionary change, not an off-the-cliff thing, but Obama’s popularity has accelerated it.”

The danger for Merkley, Lunch said, is that probably half of the 167,000 new Democratic voters are new to voting, and are therefore more likely to be “drop-off” voters who support Obama but then leave the rest of the ballot blank. Another problem: Oregon’s ballots don’t allow voters to cast a single vote for all Democratic or all Republican candidates.

“The Democratic Party is very well-organized here and is sending out mailers to voters about this,” Lunch said. “Whether they will succeed or not is another question.”