Kaine/Allen remains close

PPP's newest poll on the Virginia Senate race finds the same thing pretty much every survey on it for the last year and a half has- an extremely close contest with little movement. Tim Kaine leads George Allen 46-44 this month, just one point different from late April when Kaine was ahead 45-44.

Independents are giving Kaine his slight lead. Allen actually has his party a little bit more unified around him, taking 87% of Republicans to Kaine's 84% of Democrats. Allen's 65% showing in the primary was a little bit less than expected, but he's not having any trouble getting the base in line. But Kaine's ahead 45-37 with independents, and that's allowing him to have the overall advantage.

Kaine's proving to be better liked by voters. He has a +5 net favorability rating at 43/38. Meanwhile Allen comes in at a -3% spread with 39% rating him positively to 42% with a negative opinion.

One thing that's been surprising in each of our last 2 polls is Allen getting 18-21% of the black vote. It seems unlikely he'll be able to get that much in the end (although he did get 15% in 2006 according to the exit poll) but it might help explain why Kaine's not shying away from appearing with Obama in public. Also, although there aren't a lot of undecideds, it's worth noting that they support Obama 41-29 in the Presidential race, so it wouldn't hurt Kaine to try to grab onto those coattails.

We also took a look ahead to next year's race for Governor. The most likely scenario would seem to be Terry McAuliffe for the Democrats against either Ken Cuccinelli or Bill Bolling for the Republicans. Only Cuccinelli out of that group has much name recognition- 64% of voters are familiar with him compared to 31% each for Bolling and McAuliffe. But that notoriety may not be a good thing- while Bolling has a slight lead over McAuliffe, 36-33, McAuliffe has a small advantage over Cuccinelli, 41-37. Bolling also does 5 points better in a hypothetical contest with Tom Perriello than Cuccinelli does- there's a clear electability difference at this point between the Republican front runners.

There's also been some talk about Mark Warner returning to Richmond and if he wants to it looks like a slam dunk. He has a 50/28 approval rating, easily making him the state's most popular politician. And he leads by 14 points in hypothetical contests with both Bolling (49-35) and Cuccinelli (51-37).

And for some comic relief we put Tareq Salahi on the poll as well. His favorability rating is up to 3% this month, from its previous 2% standing on our late April poll. But alas he still trails the trio of Democrats we tested by anywhere from 14 to 30 points.

Full results here

Comments

[Obama 2012]

I don't see why Kaine would shy away from Obama when Obama has an 8 point lead in your VA polls (plus he won by 7 in 2008...)

It's unimaginable to me that Allen will really get anything close to that # of black votes.

[Mike]

And J Webb for governor in 2013?

I would like to see him also in the following poll.