RALEIGH – North Carolina now has a rollicking, revealing, and interesting Republican nomination fight for governor.

Of course, the primary is on Tuesday, so the arrival of this compelling campaign might be considered a bit late. On the other hand, here we are in the middle of summer holding what is likely to be a low-turnout primary, so who’s to say anyone would have been paying attention until now?

Here’s the latest:

* New polls came out this week showing widely divergent results in the gubernatorial horserace. A Survey USA poll for two North Carolina television stations put Richard Vinroot ahead of the pack at 35 percent, followed by Patrick Ballantine at 24 percent, Bill Cobey at 20 percent, the other three candidates at a combined 12 percent, and 10 percent undecided. Since previous media polls had put Cobey in second place and Ballantine a relatively distant third, these findings were newsworthy.

Then on Thursday, a Mason-Dixon poll for The Winston-Salem Journal and other media materialized. It also had Vinroot in the lead, at 30 percent, with Ballantine at 19 percent, Cobey at 16 percent, the other candidates at 9 percent, and a whopping 26 percent undecided. Not to be outdone, the Cobey campaign issued the findings of its own internal poll that showed a very different race: Vinroot at 25 percent, Cobey at 22 percent, Ballantine at 17 percent, 7 percent for other candidates, and 29 percent undecided.

What’s going on? Well, for one thing the Survey USA poll obviously is more aggressive in pushing undecided respondents to declare a “leaning” in the race, given that they ended up with a core of 10 percent undecided while the others had more than a quarter undecided. There are coherent arguments to be made on either side of this. The argument for pushing undecideds to declare a lean is that you can’t vote undecided at the polls. Since the polls are already trying to screen for “likely voters,” the assumption is that these respondents will vote and don’t yet have a firm decision but will make one. So pressing them for a leaning is the only true way to take the pulse of the electorate at this particular point in time.

The contrary argument is that a leaning is not the same thing as a real voter preference. For one thing, the situation being as fluid as it is in this race, voters could easily change their minds based on what they hear before Election Day. Second, just because someone ends up in a “likely voter” poll doesn’t mean that he or she will actually vote. Some of the undecideds probably won’t show up at all, so taking their faint pulse doesn’t tell you much — politically speaking, they’re dead.

Speaking of turnout, Cobey’s poll is stated as reflecting a sample that is “stratified by county to make certain that it accurately reflects historic voter turnout patterns for Republican primary elections.” The media polls don’t use such weighting, as least as far as I know. And I can understand why: it sounds easy to get wrong, particularly for a midsummer primary that does not have much of a precedent in NC Republican politics.

Insert your favorite cliché here about the polls that count. This time, they all apply.

* Vinroot is bringing Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform to the state Friday for a series of touch-down press conferences at airports and venues across North Carolina. I’m told that some time ago Vinroot invited Norquist, a well-known fiscal conservative and activist, to appear with him to talk about the tax issue and Vinroot’s signing of ATR’s candidate pledge not to raise taxes. When the invitation was extended, and accepted, ATR had on record only the signatures of Vinroot and George Little among the gubernatorial candidates.

Then, getting an inkling of the coming media blitz, the Ballantine campaign on Monday sent in their signed no-new-tax pledge, which ATR dutifully reported in an updated press release on Tuesday. Then on Thursday, getting more than just an inkling of the Friday press conferences, Cobey’s campaign faxed their pledge into ATR’s Washington offices.

Why didn’t Ballantine and Cobey sign the pledge weeks ago, as Vinroot did? Ballantine’s campaign said that because he had previously taken the pledge as a state senate candidate, he didn’t think he needed to fill out the form again for his governor’s race — a misimpression now rectified. As for Cobey, his staff said that he never received a letter or call from ATR asking him to take the pledge, and was happy to do so when he found out about it. For their part, ATR staffers insisted that they had sent letters and make several follow-up calls to the campaign.

I’ll be curious to see what Vinroot and Norquist say during the Friday mini-tour. Election Day approaches, and it finally feels like it.

UPDATE: I was told Friday morning that the Mason-Dixon poll did, in fact, attempt to use historical returns on Republican primary turnout to weight the sample by county, just as Cobey’s pollster did. So perhaps the Cobey poll is way off base, or the two formulas are dissimilar.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.