By BERRY CRAIG
AFT Local 1360
Go on, admit it. That Mason-Dixon poll scared you. Joseph Gerth's Oct. 21 Courier-Journal column made you mad. Good. Now vote for our endorsed candidates. Get your family, friends and neighbors to vote for them, too:
Andy Beshear, governor; Jacqueline Coleman, lieutenant governor
Greg Stumbo, attorney general
Heather French Henry, secretary of state
Michael Bowman, treasurer
Sheri Donahue, auditor
Robert Haley Conway, commissioner of agriculture
They're all Democrats, but we didn't endorse them--unanimously--just because they're Democrats. We're in their corner because they're in our corner.
Anyway, that Mason-Dixon poll has the governor's race tied at 46 percent apiece. "As has been the case in recent elections, Democrats have fielded a candidate for major statewide office who comes screaming out of the gate with a lead in the polls, only to see it wither away in the final month or so before the election," Gerth wrote on Oct. 21. (On Oct. 23, he wrote a followup musing that was headlined, "Matt Bevin appears to have momentum. Can the GOP stop him from screwing it up?")
We can screw it up for our endorsed candidates by not showing up at the polls on Nov. 5.
About this time four years ago, a Bluegrass poll--considered the gold standard of surveys back then--had our guy Jack Conway up by five percentage points over Bevin.
Bevin won by nine.
Turnout on Nov. 3, 2015, was less than 31 percent. In other words, only 16 percent of eligible voters elected Bevin. Sixteen percent gave us one of the most--if not the most--anti-union governor in Kentucky history.
I still wonder how many union members looked at the polls, figured Conway had it in the bag and didn't bother to vote. Nobody's got anything in the bag if the Mason-Dixon poll is on the money.
Don't get me wrong. Gerth is one of my favorite C-J scribes. He's right about dwindling Democratic opinion poll numbers and GOP wins in the only polls that count.
That Hart poll a few weeks back had Beshear up by nine percent over the state's union-buster-in-chief. In a Morning Consult tracking poll released earlier this month, Bevin is no longer the country's most unpopular governor. He now ranks 49th. In the poll, his approval rating clicked up two points to 34 percent; his disapproval numbers declined from 56 to 53.
At our recent state convention, Beshear urged us "to take ownership of this race....[and] work day and night until Nov. 5 to get every single vote out. That is how we win this race. None of us want to wake up on November the sixth thinking if we'd just done a little bit more, we could have pulled this thing out."
Think about that. Think hard.
The Mason-Dixon poll numbers should be stuck on union hall bulletin boards from Paducah to Pikeville. So should Gerth's Oct. 21 column. I'd put both beneath Beshear's warning in boldface and italics: "None of us want to wake up on November the sixth thinking if we'd just done a little bit more, we could have pulled this thing out."
So stay scared, brothers and sisters. Stay mad. Most importantly, vote accordingly.