A few days ago, I talked with a close friend of mine in northern Kentucky--one of the reddest pieces of real estate in the nation. He told me something shocking--Bruce Lunsford actually came closer to dumping Mitch McConnell than we thought.
Conventional wisdom is that the only thing that saved McConnell's bacon was McCain's 16-point trouncing of Obama over here. But my friend told me that Lunsford's biggest blunder was ceding northern Kentucky to McConnell. If that sounds familiar to any Kentuckians out here, it's the very same mistake Scotty Baesler made in 1998--the whole reason Kentucky inflicted us with Jim Bunning.
As incomprehensible as this may be for a Dem running in a competitive Senate race in 2008, it makes even less sense when you consider two other things.
- Lunsford had a much bigger war chest than Baesler did--the money it would have taken to advertise on Cincy TV would have been a drop in the bucket for him.
- Lunsford is a good bit more conservative than Baesler--the kind of Dem northern Kentucky is willing to vote for (from what I understand, he's only slightly more liberal than Ken Lucas).
My friend even suggested that there was an outside chance Lunsford actually could have helped Obama pull it out statewide--by showing that the national party believes there's more to Kentucky than just Louisville and Lexington. As proof, they absolutely love Obama over there now--he's got approval ratings of 67 percent. They don't see him as a typical politician there. And in a region that gave us such troglodytes as Bunning and Geoff Davis, that's stunning.