海角大神

For months now, the Senate race in South Dakota, which is open due to the fact that Sen. Tim Johnson (D) is retiring, has been seen as an easy Republican pickup. Former Gov. Mike Rounds easily won the GOP nomination for the seat has been, and continues to be, the frontrunner in the race. One potential curve ball in the race has been the Independent candidacy of former Sen. Larry Pressler, who represented the state from 1979 through 1997 as both a congressman (back in the day when South Dakoka still had two Congressional Districts) and later as senator, who聽entered the race late last year聽in what many viewed at the time as a quixotic bid for a comeback. As it turns out, Pressler has polled stronger than many had expected, no doubt in some part due to name recognition, but聽a new poll is raising questions about whether he could pose a threat to Rounds in November:

Independent Larry Pressler continues to steal support from Republican Mike Rounds in the race for US Senate, while Democrat Rick Weiland falls behind, a new poll shows.

There hasn鈥檛 been a whole lot of polling in South Dakota this year, but what there has been has shown Rounds in the lead in what has turned into a three-way race, thanks to Pressler鈥檚 stronger than initially expected showing in the polls. Polling conducted prior to the release of this poll showed Rounds up by聽15 points聽and聽13 points,聽respectively, and even with this new poll added in, Rounds maintains聽an 11.7 point lead in the RealClearPolitics average.聽As with聽the poll we saw earlier this week from Kentucky, though, this new poll raises the question of whether we鈥檙e looking at an outlier or the indication that the race is changing in the final month thanks largely to a rise in support for Pressler, who had been a fixture in South Dakota politics until being defeated in 1996 by the senator whom he now seeks to succeed. Up until now, Pressler has seemingly played the role of spoiler by preventing either candidate from getting anywhere close to 50% of the vote in a poll, but the question now is whether he鈥檚 likely to become a real contender.

As with the poll that purports to show Alison Lundergan Grimes leading in Kentucky, it is best to take this single result with a grain of salt. As with Kentucky, all of the polling to date has shown Rounds, and indeed with a very strong lead, so a single poll that shows something different should be viewed suspiciously until there are others polls out there that seem to corroborate it. Additionally, it鈥檚 worth noting that, like Kentucky, this is a SurveyUSA poll and it was released on the same day as聽a SurveyUSA poll of the Kansas Senate race that showed Greg Orman with a smaller lead over Pat Roberts than any of the other recent polling.聽While its possible that SurveyUSA is picking up something that other pollsters are not, it鈥檚 also possible that these three polls are indicative of something quirky in their methodology that is causing them to come up with results that are outside of the mainstream. Again, we鈥檒l have to wait to see what other pollsters have to say.

Nate Silver聽comments on the new poll and what it might mean for the race:

So, stay tuned on this one, but suffice it to say that if the GOP has to start worrying about South Dakota this late in the game, its going to play havoc with their game plan for the last month of the race.

Doug Mataconis appears on the Outside the Beltway blog at http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/.