Howey Politics Poll Raises More Questions with IN's Senate Race

Indiana's US Senate race has lacked a lot of polling despite being competitive. Because Indiana outlaws so-called "robopolling", organizations like Public Policy Polling and Gallup have stayed away while mostly internal polling have dominated the polling for this tossup election.

Today's Howey Politics poll, the crosstabs of which were allegedly released during a media event but haven't been posted online either at Howey's site or elsewhere, show Democrat Joe Donnelly at 47% against Republican Richard Mourdock at 36%. with a +/-3.5% margin of error. Libertarian nominee Andrew Horning is at 6%.

Taking a look back at the May poll before the Republican primary, the HPI poll also pegged a Mourdock victory over incumbent Senator Richard Lugar in the GOP primary. They predicted Mourdock had a base of 43% and could go as high as 48%, while Lugar's base started at 35% and only topped out at 38%.

What Howey didn't predict was the surge of support for Mourdock in the Republican primary. Out of 661,606 votes cast, Mourdock earned over 60% at 400,321. Lugar even lost Marion County, the county of which he served as Mayor of Indianapolis in the 1970s.

For a while, I've been saying that Libertarian candidate Horning has been polling remarkably high and his support will likely deflate if the race remains competitive between Donnelly and Mourdock. The conventional wisdom, even among Republican movers-and-shakers, is that Donnelly is going to win and it isn't worth the time to invest more money in a losing Senate candidate. And while Horning might lose support from disaffected Democrats who will come home to vote for Donnelly, he might gain support from Republicans who can't stomach Mourdock but will vote for the GOP team in every other election.

This will be interesting to see how it all turns out.