The WPRI gubernatorial poll numbers came out Friday evening, and they’re much more informative than the Kennedy numbers are. Let’s start with the baseline numbers.  If the election was held in late January, here’s what we would have had.

Caprio = 30%, Robitaille = 13%, Chafee = 31%, Not sure = 23%, Refused = 2%
Lynch = 23%, Robitaille = 18%, Chafee = 34%, Not sure = 22%, Refused = 3% 

Based on these numbers we can see that Caprio has a strong pull of the more conservative voters that would move to either Chafee of Robitaille if he doesn’t win the Democratic primary.  This largely comports with a poll conducted for Chafee in late October that showed Frank Caprio pulling supporters away from Rory Smith (yeah, remember him?).  This is something that Patrick Lynch will not be able to do.  Caprio is a pretty conservative guy, and Republicans know it (so does everyone else).

Second, while these numbers predict either be a Caprio win or a Chafee win, it is far from settled.  We’re 7 months from the primary, and 9 months from the general election, so a lot can happen between now and then.  Also, with a quarter of the respondents not sure or refusing to say who they will vote for, it’s a wide open race.  Lynch and Robitaille will have their work cut out for them to convert the undecided voters to supporters, but they’re definitely not shut out.

Third, in a three-way race (4-way with the Moderate candidate, 5-way with Todd Giroux), a candidate could pull off a victory with as little as 40% of the vote total, maybe even less depending on how many candidates actually end up in the race and their respective tallies.  This could be problematic with regard to legitimacy in governing.  If a majority of the voting population ends up casting a ballot for someone other than the winner in November, the new Governor will have to reconcile that (or at least deal with the consequences).  Call it the Bill Clinton effect.

A surprising element in the poll was the union household results.  Not so much that Chafee gets a little bit more support (35%) than does Lynch (33%) among households with a union member, but that the union household totals don’t really change with Caprio in the race (32% for Caprio and 35% for Chafee).  That was pretty startling to me, especially considering Caprio’s willingness to alienate organized labor in the state.

There is also the all-important question of what effect the eventual Moderate Party candidate will have on the race.  We all know that the Moderates will need to pull at least 5% of the total vote otherwise they lose their ballot access.  Whoever they get will have to be at least a credible candidate (the Moderates have no allusions that they’ll actually win the governorship in November – they just need 5%).  We’ll find out in a couple weeks who their gubernatorial candidate will be.

If the Moderates put up a strong candidate with some pretty conservative economic credentials (based on their Party platform), what’s going to separate him/her from Robitaille?  Or from Caprio, if he wins the Dem primary?  Or even from Chafee?  This is a political calculus that everyone in the campaign must be thinking about: what happens when there is a 4-person or 5-person race, and most (if not all) of them are economic conservatives?

Again, here are the candidates:

Frank Caprio (D, maybe R)
Patrick Lynch (D)
Lincoln Chafee (I)
Todd Giroux (I)
John Robitaille (R)
Unknown Moderate Party Candidate 

Also, the ProJo has an online poll.  You can vote for Governor here.