Ahead of second debate, Dean faces uphill battle against Lee

With less than a month until Election Day, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Karl Dean is facing an uphill battle in his race against Republican Bill Lee.

Dean is down in all polls that have been publicly released. He has received no financial support from a major organization affiliated with his own party. And last week, Dean didn’t clearly dominate the first of three gubernatorial debates.

But that doesn’t mean Dean is completely out, his supporters and political experts say.

Last week, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics election tracker, changed its rating of the Dean-Lee race.

The Crystal Ball previously said Tennessee’s gubernatorial race was “Likely Republican.” But last week, it was changed to “Safe Republican.”

Although not a death blow to Dean’s campaign, the ratings change underlined the former Nashville mayor’s narrow path to victory.

The change comes less than a month after the Republican Governors Association expressed so much confidence that it held back on a plan to run a final round of ads before the election. The RGA will still run ads but scaled back its ad buy.

“RGA feels very good about the race and as polls show Lee with a doubledigit lead, we are confident that Republicans will continue to hold the Tennessee governorship,” Jon Thompson, communications director for the RGA, said at the time.

The RGA’s decision to wait out comes while the Democratic Governors Association has remained on the sidelines.

While the DGA’s decision to abstain from Tennessee’s race might be an indication that they don’t view it as competitive, the organization says they’re keeping tabs on it.

“Karl Dean is a strong candidate for governor with a plan to work across party lines, expand Medicaid and grow the economy for all of Tennessee,” said Jared Leopold, communications director for the DGA. “The DGA is closely monitoring this race.”

Dean has been zeroing in on his support for Medicaid expansion, in hopes of using the issue to propel him to the governor’s mansion. He’s released new ads on the issue and brought it up several times during the first debate he had against Lee.

“Dean’s polling must be showing it’s having some effect because he continues to talk about it and hammer on it,” said John Geer, a Vanderbilt University political science professor.

“There’s still probably a bit of an edge for Dean on this issue — whether it’s enough to transform the race that’s a much bigger and more difficult question to answer.”

Geer said despite the variables Dean faces — the polls, the DGA’s lack of spending and the race’s ranking change — the outcome of the race remains unclear.

“Neither candidate is super well known. Those preferences that people have aren’t super set,” Geer said. “You could imagine some changes on Election Day or during the early voting period.”

A recent Fox News poll found as many as 10 percent of likely voters surveyed did not know who they would vote for in the election. Another recent poll — from NBC News and Survey Monkey — found that while Dean was down 11 percentage points, as many as 19 percent of respondents remained undecided on the race.

Geer said Dean’s path to victory would certainly be a surprise and it would require Democrats, who are showing signs of being energized throughout the country, to show up in November in droves. “It’s not impossible by any means.” Reach Joel Ebert at jebert@tennessean.com or 615-772-1681.