A new poll by the Republican-leaning Rasmussen Reports finds Texas Democratic gubernatorial nominee Wendy Davis trailing Republican nominee Attorney General Greg Abbott by single digits among likely voters.

The new poll released Friday found Abbott with 48 percent support of those surveyed while Davis got 40 percent. Another 3 percent said they backed another candidate and the last 9 percent said they were undecided.

Rasmussen's new findings contrast with a previous survey it did in March which found Abbott leading Davis by double digits, 53 percent to 41 percent.

The race is still widely considered to favor Republicans.

The survey was conducted among 850 likely voters in Texas between August 4 and August 5. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

For months, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell has accused his Democratic opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, of engaging in a “war on coal,” casting her as an outright enemy of one of the state’s most vital industries.

But while McConnell presents himself as a defender of Kentucky coal mining, a member of his own family who serves as a key campaign surrogate is taking a role in an organization that funds one of the most aggressive anti-coal campaigns in the country.

McConnell’s wife, former Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, sits on the board of directors of Bloomberg Philanthropies, which has plunged $50 million into the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal initiative, an advocacy effort with the expressed goal of killing the coal industry.

In 2011, Bloomberg Philanthropies teamed up with the Sierra Club to target coal plants for closure in an effort to "end our nation’s reliance on dirty coal, plant-by-plant, community-by-community, and state-by-state," according to Bloomberg Philanthropies’ website. The Bloomberg Philanthropies-funded campaign has a stated goal of “retir[ing] a third of the nation’s 500 coal plants by 2020, replacing the majority of retired coal plants, and keep[ing] coal in the ground in Appalachia.” The organization boasts that it has “prevented 150 coal plants from being built” and has taken direct action against 16 plants in McConnell’s home state of Kentucky, arguing that coal production is a health hazard and is harmful to the environment. The website takes credit for retiring 172 “dirty power plants” with “351 to go.”

A Louisville, Kentucky judge up for reelection is being criticized for controversial comments about African-American defendants, the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting (KYCIR) claims.

According to courtroom video obtained by KYCIR (below), Judge Sandra McLaughlin said of an African-American defendant being arraigned on drug charges that “he’s lucky to get out of here alive,” before adding, “did you see his shirt? Barack Obama, ‘Let’s Do It Again.’ That was a double whammy.”

McLaughlin is the lowest-rated judge in Jefferson County “by a wide margin,” according to the Louisville Bar Association (LBA). The reason for her low-rating, as KYCIR discovered, is her apparent belief that the all African-Americans in her court room are unrepentant drug dealers.

Last October, she accused Wesley Taylor, who had been arrested for and charged with drug possession, of being there because he was “selling dope to little children.” One week later, she said of Ronnie Gravel — who had been arrested and charged with burglary — that “he still needs to burglarize so he can maintain his drug habit.”