New Kentucky governor poll shows Beshear with double-digit lead over Cameron

A new poll from Emerson College and Fox 56 shows Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear with a commanding 16-point lead over Republican nominee attorney general Daniel Cameron.

Out of 450 registered Kentucky voters polled Oct. 1-3, 49% told the independent, nonpartisan pollster they would vote for Beshear if an election between him and Cameron were held today. 33% said they would vote for Cameron. 13% of the respondents were undecided, and 5% said they’d vote for “someone else” despite there being no one else on the ballot.

With 450 registered voters surveyed, the margin of error on the results is +/-4.6%.

The 16-point lead is the largest in any publicly released poll, by a wide margin. Polls conducted from June to late September showed Beshear with anywhere from a 10-point lead to mid-single digits. A poll recently released by the conservative group Club For Growth showed Cameron down six percentage points to Beshear but gaining on the governor in the month of September.

Elections analysis website fivethirtyeight.com gives Emerson College an “A-” rating as a pollster.

Beshear’s campaign has outspent Cameron’s significantly throughout the general election season. Even with multiple political action committees (PACs) supporting Cameron, the amount of pro-Beshear advertisements on television thus far this month has outnumbered Cameron and groups supporting him. During the first full week of October, $1.8 million was spent on ads supporting Beshear compared to roughly $600,000 on ads for Cameron.

Unlike in 2019 — when Beshear defeated controversial former GOP governor Matt Bevin by a razor-thin 0.4 percentage point, 5,000-vote margin — there is no third-party candidate on the ballot this year. In 2019, Libertarian candidate John Hicks received 2% of the vote.

Who took the poll?

The responses to the poll roughly match up with Kentucky voters’ political behavior in a couple key ways: a majority voted for former Republican president Donald Trump in 2020, and most of them do not like current Democratic President Joe Biden. 55% said they voted for Trump in 2020 while 32% said they voted for Biden — Trump won that election 62-36.

In Kentucky, roughly 46% of registered voters are Republican, 44% are registered Democrat and a little more than 10% are registered as something else, according to State Board of Elections data from September.

However, the responses indicate the population surveyed was registered Democrat at a much lower rate than Kentucky voters on the whole and registered as independent at a much higher rate than the commonwealth’s voters. 31% said they were Democrats, 47% said they were Republicans and 22% said they were Independent or “other” when asked about their party registration.

Fox 56 reported an executive at Emerson College Polling said that out of those polled, Beshear held the support of 85% of registered Democrats, 44% of independents and 28% of Republicans. Cameron had the commitment of 53% of Republicans and 25% of independent voters, the pollster said.

When asked which comes closest to describing the way that Biden won the 2020 election — he won fair and square or he stole the election — 47% of those polled said “stole the election” came closest to describing the election while 36% sided with “fair and square.” About 17% were undecided on that question.

Just over half of the polling was conducted via landline while the remainder was conducted online.

When asked if they approved, disapproved or were neutral/had no opinion of Beshear’s job performance, 43.5% of respondents said they approved of Beshear. 28% said they disapproved while another 28% said they were neutral or had no opinion on the matter.

Polling history

Emerson College and Fox 56 paired up for two polls during the state’s hotly contested GOP gubernatorial primary. Both of those had Cameron in the lead, though the attorney general ended up winning by a much wider margin than predicted in those polls. Cameron ended up garnering about 48% of the Republican primary vote, though the last poll had him with 33% support. Further, commissioner of agriculture Ryan Quarles finished in second over third-place finisher Kelly Craft, despite those polls repeatedly placing Craft in second.

Sean Southard, spokesperson for the Cameron campaign and the Republican Party of Kentucky, pointed to the discrepancy between the primary polls and the results when responding to the latest Emerson poll.

“You may recall that Emerson was off by 15 points right before the primary, having Cameron at 33 and he ended up at 48. Daniel Cameron will win on November 7. Kentuckians are tired of the Biden/Beshear agenda that has given them record high inflation, rising crime, and an open southern border,” Southard wrote in a statement.

In election cycles past, general election polling on Kentucky’s gubernatorial election has sometimes proven tricky.

Independent pollsters like NBC News/Marist and Mason-Dixon were essentially spot on in their polling of the Beshear-Bevin race, both producing October polls that showed a dead heat between the two 2019 candidates. 2015 was a different story, though. Polls in general were several points off that year, with many predicting former Democratic attorney general Jack Conway would defeat Bevin; Bevin ended up winning by a sizable nine-point margin.