Progress Illinois

On Friday's edition of WTTW's Chicago Tonight, the "Week In Review" panel discussed Illinois' tightest congressional races, specifically the contests in the 10th and 11th districts.  While discussing the former, NBC5's Mary Ann Ahern described GOP Rep. Mark Kirk as "doing very well so far in the polls" vis-a-vis Democratic challenger Dan Seals.  This left me scratching my head a bit because, over the past two months, we've seen only two polls out of the 10th, both of them internals.  A poll commissioned by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee found Seals trailing Kirk by only seven in mid-August.  Meanwhile, a poll paid for by the Kirk campaign in mid-September found the incumbent with a 22-point lead.

Well, now there's a new poll on the scene, commissioned by the liberal website Daily Kos and conducted by the nonpartisan Research 2000 between September 30 and October 1.  It shows Kirk leading Seals by only six points, 44-38 percent. 

As the Swing State Project noted after Kirk released his internal poll last month, the cross-tabs suggested the campaign was seriously oversampling Republicans:

The partisan breakdown of the [Kirk] poll is 35D-33R-29I. Labels and Lists pegs the district as 34D-21R-44I, and other internal Democratic numbers I've seen show Dems with a 7-point advantage here in terms of partisan identity.

The Research 2000 poll doesn't put the percentage of Independents quite as high as Labels and Lists.  But compared to the Kirk poll, there are six percent more Independents sampled and six percent less Republicans, which surely contributed to the vastly different results.  Here's the breakdown:

Democrats:                 139 (35%)
Republicans:               115 (29%)
Independents/Other:   146 (36%)

Seals' TV ads over the last month should also have also helped him, particularly considering that Kirk began saturating the local airwaves about a month earlier.