A couple of polls out today. Make of them what you will.
* YAY DEMOCRATS: Nate Steel, the Democratic candidate for attorney general, touts a poll commissioned by the Southern Progress Fund, a pro-Democrat group, which purportedly shows him with a 37-33 lead over Republican Leslie Rutledge. it was described as a poll last week of 600 registered voters with a 3.5 percent margin of error. Poll itself not released, but it supposedly did other races. It perhaps is the poll to which Mike Ross referred in a recent Fort Smith speech that he characterized as putting his race in a dead heat.
* YAY REPUBLICANS: A Florida outfit called Gravis Marketing, led by a Republican operative named Doug Kaplan, put out Arkansas poll numbers that showed leads of various sizes by all Republican candidates in Arkansas. For example, it had Rutledge with a 42-33 lead over Steel. Interestingly enough, it had much smaller leads for Republicans Asa Hutchinson in the race for governor against Mike Ross and Tom Cotton in the race for Senate with Mark Pryor. A few words about Gravis Marketing. Slate cited it for the worst poll of the spring election season; it was ripped to pieces in this 2012 article and today’s poll has a couple of obvious errors — disagreement in the numbers reported in the summary news release with numbers in the graphic and omission of third-party candidates in both the Senate and governor’s race.
That Southern Progress poll (last week by Answers Unlimited) has Mark Pryor up 4 over Tom Cotton (versus Gravis with Cotton up 47-43) and Hutchinson and Ross in a dead heat at 44-44 (versus Gravis with Hutchinson up 46-42 — or maybe 46-43 depending on which figure you believe in their original website posting)
75.com (the Arkansas Times’ answer to Nate Silver’s 538.com) says both races are very close