New poll of Washington gubernatorial race is first to give solid lead to Jay Inslee

Rep. Jay Inslee (D) Elway. 7/18-22. Registered voters. MoE ±5%. (6/13-16 results in parentheses, 2/7-9 results in brackets):

Jay Inslee (D): 43 (40) [36]
Rob McKenna (R): 36 (42) [45]

The last time a Republican won the governor's chair in Washington? 1980. That's the longest one-party streak in the nation. Most people have been in agreement that if there's a year when this streak would end, this year would be a good chance. Between the combination of a strong GOP candidate (AG Rob McKenna, elected statewide twice, with a base in the Democratic stronghold of King County, and skilled at evoking the moderation of Northwest Republicans of decades past), a Democratic candidate with a name recognition deficit (former Rep. Jay Inslee, who used to represent WA-01 in Seattle's northern suburbs), and an overall sense of "Democrat fatigue" settling over the state, all the pieces were in place. And for the last year, the polls have generally borne that out, with McKenna almost always leading, peaking in early spring with a spate of polls giving McKenna leads in the 9- or 10-point range.

There's been a tightening trend in the last few months that's unmistakable, with Inslee pulling it back into Tossup territory, usually trailing by only a point or two. That seemed to be where the race would stay, all the way up to Election Day, given the tension between the state's large, reliable Democratic base and McKenna's strength among independents. However, this month's poll from prominent local pollster Elway totally upends that; it's the first poll of the race giving Inslee anything more than a paper-thin lead (and the first public poll since SurveyUSA's June 2011 poll to give Inslee a lead, period).

McKenna hasn't had a good month of press; for starters, there was the Supreme Court decision on the ACA, which served to remind everyone that he was one of a very few blue-state AGs to sign on with the multi-state lawsuit against it. There was also a lot of penny-ante stuff that's slowly gotten accumulative in the local media, like the controversy over having one of his policy staffers getting caught with a variety of offensive tweets on her account or his attempts to dodge a local reporter's gun control questions.

What may be more important than this inside-baseball stuff, though, is that this poll came in the gap in which Inslee had rolled out his first TV ad'something that no doubt reminded a lot of low-info but reliably Democratic voters of his existence'but before McKenna had started running his first TV spot. Inslee's finally getting to the point where he has the Dem base as nailed down (86 percent) as well as McKenna has the GOPers (88 percent). (Plus, in this poll, Inslee actually has a 2-point lead among independents; a Republican simply can't win Washington without a sizable win among indies.)

Or, it's certainly possible that this poll is an outlier ... or, if not technically an outlier, at least a poll pushing the edge of the confidence interval (remember, at a 5 percent margin of error, the actual result could still be McKenna 41, Inslee 38 and the poll could still be "right"). At any rate, it's got to be a confidence-booster for Washington Democrats, for whom the race seemed to be slipping away half a year ago.