A new independent poll gives coal billionaire Jim Justice the lead in West Virginia's gubernatorial race
West Virginia's not a state that gets polled often, but now we have
our third survey out of the Mountain State in recent weeks, this time from Repass Research on behalf of MetroNews. In the Democratic primary, Repass finds coal billionaire Jim Justice with a 40-34 lead on state Senate Minority Leader Jeff Kessler, a bit wider than the 28-26 Justice edge that Kessler's
own internal showed.
Repass also has Justice up by a large 46-37 margin over state Senate President Bill Cole, the likely Republican nominee. There's a good reason to be skeptical of that spread, though, since a Democratic poll that was probably paid for by Justice only had him up 36-30. If internal data, which presumably is going to be on the rosier side, has Justice ahead by 6, then how likely is it that he's actually up 9?
There's another reason to wonder about Repass' numbers, too: They have Cole beating Kessler 44-35, which would mean there's an 18-point electability spread between the two Democratic hopefuls. It's certainly possible that Justice, as a businessman without a voting record, is better-liked than Kessler, who's been in office almost two decades (and as a Democrat in a state increasingly hostile to the party). But it's hard to explain a gap of this magnitude between two candidates, without one guy being a totally scandal-plagued pariah. So it's hard to know where things really stand, and as the ballgame announcers say, there's still a lot of baseball left to play.