Morning Digest: Independent poll gives Hawaii's governor his first lead in Democratic primary
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The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar. Leading Off ●Morning Digest: Independent poll gives Hawaii's governor his first lead in Democratic primary
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar. Leading Off ● HI-Gov: Mason-Dixon has conducted a rare poll of Hawaii's Aug. 11 Democratic primary and November general elections on behalf of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, and their primary survey surprisingly has Gov. David Ige up 44-40 over Rep. Colleen Hanabusa. That result is a huge reversal from their March survey, where he trailed by a 47-27 blowout. Campaign Action Indeed, this is the first publicly available poll of the race to see Ige in the lead, but polling has been quite limited. While it's rare for a governor to lose renomination, Ige has looked like the underdog for a long time against the well-known and better-connected Hanabusa, and the false ballistic missile warning that the state sent out in January only seemed to intensify his problems. However, Mason-Dixon pollster Brad Coker suggests that, since the March poll came just weeks after the false alert, that survey found Ige at a temporary low point he recovered from as more time passed. Coker also speculated that Ige recovered as memories faded about that incident and voters started to give the governor credit for his handling of the ongoing Kilauea volcano eruption. However, we don't have enough data to say if Ige's position really has improved over the last few months, and Hawaii has proven to be a particularly tough state to poll. Hanabusa's campaign is out with their own survey arguing that Ige is still very much in trouble with a month to go. The QMark survey, which was released around the same time that the Mason-Dixon survey came out, gives Hanabusa a huge 57-31 lead. That margin is not very different than the 52-23 lead she posted in QMark's May poll. Meanwhile, the general election doesn't look like it will be all that competitive. Among the six matchups tested by Mason-Dixon with Hanabusa or Ige against one of the various unheralded candidates on the GOP side, the only one that isn't a total rout still sees Hanabusa with a 48-35 lead over state House Minority Leader Andria Tupola. Read more