New Poll Shows Tight Race in the 9th

It’s a tight race, and much closer than some might have thought, according to a new poll from Wilson Research. The executive summary is available here.

SurveyUSA, which commissioned a poll over the same time frame indicating a dramatically different result, has never polled accurately in the 9th District. In 2004, when Sodrel won, their polling indicated a margin for Hill outside of the margin of error. In 2006, when Hill won by 5%, their polling indicated a narrow margin in favor of Sodrel.

So where do the two divergent polls leave the race, beyond it being another down-to-the-wire battle in the bloody 9th? My own guess is that, if Sodrel was running a more vigorous campaign beyond his existing grassroots efforts and below-the-radar campaigning (something with significant air time buys and so forth), he would hold a lead right now.

It’s amazing that he has run a campaign this low-profile and it is this close. He’s almost channeling John Hostettler or something.

(Read more after the leap)
A few other factors cannot be overlooked. The last time that the 9th District was represented by a Democrat in the majority was in 1994. Since then, Democrats elected here have never had to take ownership of the policies of their party. They could always be comfortably distant from them. While they might be whipped on floor votes from time to time by their more liberal party leadership, these were easy to explain away, they were never actually implemented, and Congress was not hugely unpopular anyway.

That is no longer the case here. Congress is very unpopular and the liberal tack being pursued by Nancy Pelosi’s majority is far out of line with the conservative sensibilities of even a lot of Democrats in the 9th District. Baron Hill’s endorsement of Barack Obama, another person whose views are far out of line with the conservative sensibilities of the district, is another factor to consider.

Your average self-described 9th District Democrat doesn’t have a whole lot in common with the Democrats that run the House of Representatives right now, and they don’t have a whole lot of shared ideology with them either. They have a whole lot more in common with the Republicans.

They may be yellow dog Democrats (”I’d sooner vote for a yellow dog than vote for a Republican,” they say), but even that loyalty–generations old as it might be–has to give way when compared to the most unpopular and liberal Congress in history.

The Wilson poll seems to bear through these fault lines. Immigration, gas prices and oil drilling, taxes, and Hoosier values all favor the conservative Republican candidate. The 62% number of those opposing Baron Hill’s reelection (either in being willing to consider someone else or already voting for someone else) is simply staggering.

And, as a longer-term consideration, I offer one final thought. Look at the donut (or “collar”) counties around Marion County. Indianapolis is a blue center to a dark-red donut, a trend that has emerged gradually over time. This is a trend that is being seen in urban areas across the country.

Indiana’s 9th District adjoins two such urban areas (Cincinnati and Louisville) where Republicans and conservatives are migrating from liberal and Democrat-inclined cities and their immediate environs to surrounding counties (suburbs and so-called exurbs). As these people migrate from Louisville and Cincinnati, nearby counties in both Kentucky and Ohio are becoming more Republican.

Counties in Indiana adjoining these urban areas are no different, and the migration causing the ranks of Republicans in such counties to swell is complemented by the disconnect many conservative Democrats now feel toward the ideological bent of their party leadership. And, importantly, it is inevitable that these two growing trends are going to eventually surpass any liberal voting block in Bloomington and Monroe County.

And when Red Bloomington drowns in the redness of the increasing conservative and Republican redness of the rest of the district, that will be all she wrote. The 9th District will look a lot more like the 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 6th. National figures like Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, though for very different reasons, are accelerating this trend.