Below The Beltway

With Rand Paul likely to win the GOP nomination for Senate tonight in Kentucky, reports like this are no doubt a cause for some concern:

The likely Rand Paul victory in the Kentucky Republican primary today should give Democrats a very good chance of winning in the fall because supporters of Trey Grayson, Paul’s main opponent, really don’t like him.

Some primaries play out in such a way that party loyalists view several of the candidates favorably and just choose the one they like best. That was very much the case with the recent Democratic contest in North Carolina. But in Kentucky we find that Paul’s supporters hate Grayson, and that even more Grayson’s supporters hate Paul.

53% of likely Grayson voters for today have an unfavorable opinion of Paul to only 23% with a positive opinion of him. More importantly though just 40% of Grayson voters say they’ll support Paul in the general election if he wins the Republican nomination with 43% explicitly saying they will not.

Paul is going to have some serious work to do to unify his party around him, especially because his supporters have gone out of their way to poke Grayson (and by extension his voters) in the eye

Of course, the same thing could be said of Grayson and his supporters and some of their attacks on Rand Paul.

Nonetheless, I’m sure that this issue is already on the mind of people in the Paul campaign, as well as Republicans in Washington. Which is one of the reasons that Kentucky Republicans have already scheduled a unity rally for this Saturday. It’s already been announced that Trey Greyon and Mitch McConnell, both of whom have been critical of Paul during the campaign, will be there along with Paul and his biggest backer to date, retiring Senator Jim Bunning.

Numbers like these aren’t uncommon after a bitterly fought primary campaign. I’m guessing they won’t be that big an issue come November.