With a little more than two weeks until Election Day, Republican state Treasurer John Kennedy holds a five point lead over his next rival — 25 percent to Democratic Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell’s 19 percent — in a new poll conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research and commissioned by Baton Rouge television station WAFB.
Democratic lawyer Caroline Fayard, the only one among the major candidates who hasn’t been elected to public office, follows Campbell with 12 percent. Fayard and Campbell, realizing only one Democrat is likely to get into the December runoff, have been sparring with one another in press releases and on social media for weeks.
Republican Congressman Charles Boustany of Lafayette, who is giving up his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives to try for retiring Sen. David Vitter’s open seat, is close on Fayard’s heels with 11 percent, just a point ahead of Tea Party Congressman John Fleming, a Republican out of North Louisiana.
Not astonishingly — this being Louisiana — former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke is in fifth place at 5 percent. Duke won 60 percent of the white vote when he ran against Edwin Edwards in the 1990 governor’s race. Perhaps most news-worthy: Duke makes the cut for the next televised debate.
Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel and Tea Party candidate, is in sixth place with 3.4 percent support. None of the other 18 candidates shows support in the single digits. The margin of error for the poll of 625 registered voters is less than 4 percent. Tellingly, perhaps, 13 percent of respondents in the poll remain undecided.