Here's a quick sampling of the latest national media's coverage of Kentucky's U.S. Senate race:
Chris Cillizza has this update in the Washington Post's The Fix, calling eye doctor Rand Paul a businessman and saying that the race with Trey Grayson is "neck and neck" despite the latest WHAS11/Courier-Journal Bluegrass Poll showing a 15 point lead for Paul:
Kentucky: In the Bluegrass State, the national focus is on the Republican Senate primary, where businessman Rand Paul -- yes, he is the son of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), a 2008 presidential candidate -- is running against Trey Grayson, Kentucky's secretary of state. At the start of the race to replace the retiring Jim Bunning, Paul was seen as a sideshow, a small bump on Grayson's road to the nomination. No longer. Paul, using the online fundraising network pioneered by his father, is at financial parity with Grayson, and polling suggests the two are running neck and neck.
A Paul victory would be the nascent "tea party" movement's first major establishment scalping. Overshadowed -- although it shouldn't be -- by the Paul-Grayson fight is the Democratic Senate primary, in which Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo and state Attorney General Jack Conway are competing. Conway leads in the money chase but Mongiardo has the edge in polling on the race.
Katie Brandenburg reports in the Houston Chronicle that Rand Paul is "less quirky" than his Texas Congressman father, Ron Paul, but is getting lots of help from Texas:
Rand is mining those family ties to help him in his primary battle. He's mobilized his father's national political network that he helped build. After all, he spoke in 10 states as part of Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign. The Ron Paul campaign also helped form the foundation of Rand's grass-roots network in Kentucky, said Scott Lasley, associate political science professor at Western Kentucky University.
“Without his dad, he's certainly not here,” Lasley said.
Still, Rand Paul has proven that he has staying power on his own. He's raised about $1.8 million and is the only top-tier candidate to receive most of his money from out-of-state sources, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. His top cities for campaign cash include Houston and Dallas.
Trey Grayson, in his position as president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, tells USA Today that he's concerned about low voter turnout in the primaries:
Since 1962, the percentage of eligible voters picking Democratic and Republican nominees for governor and U.S. Senate has been declining to less than 10% per party. The percentages are even lower for U.S. House and state legislature primaries, Gans says.
"It's a concern," Trey Grayson, Kentucky's secretary of State and the president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, said of the low voter participation in primaries.
Grayson and his counterparts, who serve as the top election officials in most states, are planning to launch a public-private partnership later this year to increase both voter registration and participation. Grayson says advertisers are joining with state voting officials to target the nation's youngest voters, those ages 18-25.
