New poll shows Huelskamp on the rise

It's almost as if Channel 12 read my mind from yesterday's posting of Jim Barnett's dismal poll numbers. A new poll released today by KWCH Channel 12 in Wichita and conducted by SurveyUSA shows Sen. Tim Huelskamp as the only major candidate that continues to gain in the polls while the other two continue to slump.

You can see a great graphic of SurveyUSA polls since February at Wichita Liberty.

The poll shows that Tim Huelskamp continues to build momentum while Barnett polls at just one point higher than he was in February. That has to be disheartening to the Barnett campaign as he just poured in a quarter of a million dollars of his own money to try and buy a congressional seat.

Tracey Mann fell back several points, undoubtedly because of his recent stumble regarding Pres. Obama's citizenship status. I've sat back on that a little bit, mostly because it's left me somewhat confused how a candidate that just two years ago gave to liberal Democrat Jim Slattery at the same time the country was sweeping Obama to the Presidency would now question his citizenship status. This simply didn't jive with the Tracey Mann that liberal Democrats in the blogosphere were cheerleading.

But I've now come to the conclusion that he's just not familiar with being a conservative and, quite frankly, just went too far in how he thought a conservative would answer.

With a week until election day, Huelskamp has positioned himself nicely to bolt to the finish line a winner!

The political metamorphosis of Jim Barnett

Bob Weeks at the Voice for Liberty in Wichita posted an interesting article a few days ago where he took the legislative vote ratings for both Sens. Tim Huelskamp and Jim Barnett and graphed them over time. It was so interesting to me that I went back to the vote ratings and created my own graph, but with a few events highlighted in Jim Barnett's political career. The result showed a politician who clearly has no moral or philosophical compass by which he governs.

As you can see below, Barnett's fiscal track record improves and declines dramatically depending on the year and what kind of election he's likely to face. In 2004 for example, he faced his first re-election to the Senate and improved his score with the Kansas Taxpayer's Network from 11% to 50% accordingly. Then in 2006, he scored a 100% rating for the first time. This, of course, coincided with his campaign against several other candidates for the Republican governor's nomination.

But in 2008, facing little opposition for his Senate seat and coming off a good amount of name recognition, the old Jim comes back with his liberal ways.

And now that election day 2010 is upon us, we once again see an upswing in his scores.

When put this way, the say anything, do anything Barnett that I know shines through. Anything to get elected, anything for more power.

And Tim Huelskamp? A record to run to, not from.

Click on the image to enlarge it.