Beware polls of Kentucky "Democrats"

Kentucky's primary is Tuesday.  Before pissed-off coal miners in West Virginia handed that state's Democratic primary to Bernie Sanders, I would not have given him a chance here in Clinton Country.

But apparently Secretary Clinton's misinterpreted remark about coal jobs hit hard in the Mountain State.  Coal miners - even unemployed ones - are a much smaller percentage of the population here in Kentucky than they are in West Virginia, so I still expect her to win.

Next Tuesday and in November.

Back in March, David Atkins wrote at Political Animal about a poll of Kentucky voters.

The poll also shows Donald Trump capturing a surprising percentage of Democratic primary voters in head-to-head general election matchups against both candidates. Donald Trump receives a shocking 37% of the Kentucky Democratic primary vote in a hypothetical contest against Clinton, and 38% against Sanders.

No.  Donald Trump received in this pretend vote precisely zero percent of the actual Democratic vote. If Donald Trump gets the actual repug nomination, he might possibly take Kentucky even against Hillary Clinton, but not because he'll get any actual Democratic votes. 

 

Kentucky conservatards have been registering Democratic since Jefferson beat Adams in 1800. They stopped voting Democratic in federal races in 1966. But they're still registered Democratic because that's what their traitors-in-defense-of-slavery great-great-grandpappies did, because it lets them fuck with the Democratic primary, because it lets them laugh every year at the pundits who think Kentucky's going blue because voter registration is majority Democratic and because it drives actual Democratic voters like me around the bend.