7 October 2016
Poll by Zinke’s campaign shows him leading by 11 points
Don’t start celebrating Denise Juneau’s victory over Ryan Zinke. She may be farther behind him than we thought. Yesterday, Juneau’s campaign announced that a Harstad poll found her trailing Zinke by just three points.
Today, reports Politico, Zinke’s campaign released an internal poll that shows him with a lead three times bigger:
An internal poll for GOP Rep. Ryan Zinke, Montana’s at-large member of Congress, shows him leading Democratic challenger Denise Juneau, with 49 percent of the vote to Juneau’s 38 percent, while 3 percent support the Libertarian candidate and 11 percent of voters are undecided. Three other GOP polls conducted for the campaign between June and early October have come back with similar results. The poll was conducted by Moore Information, which surveyed 400 likely voters from Oct. 2-3. The margin of error was plus or minus 5 percentage points.
It’s smart to be wary of internal polls. They’re almost always released only when the information helps the candidate, and often the crosstabs and other data are withheld.
Both polls put Zinke below 50 percent. Juneau can take some encouragement from that. But she can take no encouragement from being down 11 percent in the Moore survey.