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DailyKos's new poll on the Arkansas Senate race is showing Bill Halter doing better against the Republican nominee, John Boozman, than Blanche Lincoln. There are a couple of reasons for progressives not to get too excited about this. For one, Halter portrays himself in the state as being just as centrist as Lincoln, and even more "fiscally responsible." He doesn't support card-check, and there's no hint that he's really going to be any more faithful to the national organizations backing him any more than Lincoln was.Moreover, a good number of his supporters might very well have been Republicans or conservatives who voted in the Democratic primary just to sink Lincoln, sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with politics, writes John Brummett, a veteran political observer who writes a column for Arkansas News Bureau:
Let’s explain something: White rural conservatives and good ol’ boys aren’t much enamored of Halter now and certainly won’t be enamored of him by November after the Republicans pour several millions into the state to explain who and what he is — meaning a labor guy a tad left of this very Blanche Lincoln whom the good ol’ boys targeted Tuesday.While there's a chance those voters don't know about the liberal groups backing Halter now, the Republican camp will make sure they know about it by the time November comes around. The DailyKos poll says that Lincoln is "dead, dead, dead." It's actually much harder for me to imagine a world in which Lincoln's rise from the dead is less likely than Halter's fall from the anti-Lincoln pedestal. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of other polls out there right now, but it's a long way to November.-- Monica Potts
