I woke up this morning to a seeming tidal wave of polling news for the midterm elections, all of which is bad for Republicans if the cable talking heads are to be believed. At the top of the list of trumpeted GOP disasters in the making was a new poll out of Kentucky which suddenly showed Alison Lundergan Grimes with a two point lead over Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

After two polls in his favor, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has slipped behind Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes in his re-election bid, according to the latest Bluegrass Poll.

Grimes, Kentucky’s secretary of state, now leads the five-term senator 46 percent to 44 percent among likely voters, the survey found. Libertarian candidate David Patterson had 3 percent support in the poll, while 7 percent of likely voters said they were undecided.

While Grimes’ advantage is within the poll’s margin of error, it represents a 6-point swing to the Democrat since the survey was last conducted in late August.

After the lessons learned in the great disaster of 2012, we should all be wary of yelling about the polls being skewed, but this one clearly invites a deeper look. This race was never going to be a blowout, particularly given the amount of discontent which McConnell faces from inside his own base, but at the same time, Grimes has never been able to build a substantial set of numbers in the Bluegrass State which showed a clear path to victory. How did the voters do such an about face in the space of a few days?

Jeff Dunetz beat me to the punch and dug up the facts which I suspected were behind it. This poll is directly contradictory to two other reliable trackers conducted in the same period.

The Bluegrass poll certainly looks very different than other polls, in fact every time the Bluegrass has done a poll it has looked like an outlier. Below is a list of every poll in the Kentucky Senate race per “Real Clear Politics.” Notice that out of the 4 polls showing Grimes with the lead three were conducted by Bluegrass.

Check out Jeff’s post for the chart, but the numbers speak rather loudly. Through this cycle, only the Bluegrass poll seems to generate these results. Even with these numbers mixed in, the RCP average still has McConnell up by 4.2% (not far off from the average we’ve seen over the past month or two) and the CBS/YouGov poll taken in the same period – which shows a number of other Republicans in trouble – has Mitch up by 6.

Dunetz also notes a difference in methodology which should be taken into account.

The methodology of the Bluegrass poll is different than the others and that might account for the difference. It is a “robo-poll,” without human interaction. mode. Per the polls methodology page:

This poll was conducted by telephone in the voice of a professional announcer. Respondent households were selected at random, using Random Digit Dialed (RDD) sample provided by Survey Sampling, of Fairfield CT. All respondents heard the questions asked identically.

These numbers are looking blatantly dubious at this point. Even Ed Kilgore – who will dance on the grave of any conservative as soon as they develop a case of the sniffles – tossed out the word outlier in his coverage before making it two paragraphs into the analysis.

This race will still wind up being close, I’m sure. But Ms. Grimes shouldn’t start ordering new drapes for McConnell’s office just yet.