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Follow us on TwitterU.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-Iowa) poll numbers appear to be slipping, even before any of his declared opponents have built up name recognition.
A new Rasmussen Reports poll measures Grassley’s support at 56 percent against Democratic candidate Bob Krause, who earned 30 percent in the poll. Krause is a virtual unknown, and he will have to win a primary before he even faces off against Grassley.
U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (Photo: Lauren Victoria Burke/WDCPIX.com)
Sure, Grassley is still polling above 50 percentage points, and that’s never a really bad place to be, but Grassley won with a significantly higher percentage of actual votes in 2004. That his support has sunk this low without an opponent that most people have even heard of is pretty surprising.
Rasmussen’s numbers mirror the approval/disapproval numbers measured by the Des Moines Register’s poll last week.
At FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver graphed all of Grassley’s approval numbers from the Register’s polls dating back to January 2003, and the trend lines are bad news for Iowa’s senior senator. Since January of this year alone, Grassley’s approval rating has dropped 18 percentage points, and his disapproval rating has increased by the same amount.
Last December, a Research 2000 poll found that in a head-to-head matchup against former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who had not yet been named U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Grassley was only ahead by four percentage points. Given his slide in the polls since then, it stands to reason that a high-profile challenger like Vilsack would actually defeat Grassley in a poll taken today.
Whether Grassley is truly in trouble remains to be seen, but his numbers are not headed in the right direction. Against a candidate with any name recognition at all, he could be in for a fight in 2010 unlike any he’s seen since winning his senate seat in 1980.
