Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor narrowly leads Republican Tom Cotton in an internal poll of the Arkansas Senate race, a sign that the vulnerable incumbent has a fighting chance in the tough contest.
The survey by Opinion Research Associates, given to TPM first by an Arkansas Democratic official on Monday, shows the Democrat leading by 1 point, well within the margin of error of plus-or-minus 5 percentage points.
“[I]n the race for the U.S. Senate, Democratic Senator Mark Pryor edges Republican Congressman Tom Cotton 45% to 44%, with Nathan LaFrance, the Libertarian, and Mark Swaney of the Green Party each getting 1%, while 10% of voters were undecided,” pollsters Ernest J. Oakleaf and Zoe D. Oakleaf wrote in the memo.
The Opinion Research Associates poll reached 401 likely Arkansas voters from October 25-26, just over one week before Election Day.
Most recent polls have found Pryor trailing Cotton, including two polls released Sunday. One NBC/Marist poll had him down 2 points, and a CBS/New York Times/YouGov poll found him behind by 5 points. Forecasters including the New York Times and FiveThirtyEight give Cotton a strong chance of victory.
Cotton leads Pryor by 4.9 percentage points in the TPM PollTracker Average.
The poll also found Democrat Mike Ross leading Republican Asa Hutchinson 44 to 42 percent in the race for governor — also inside the margin of error. Eleven percent were undecided in that race.
His internal poll says he’s up 1. Well he sounds like another Romney. I hope they are right but from what I have read, he’s going down
Bad sign that his own internal poll shows him up by 1. Internal polls are generally junk science. This is the classic last play of someone that knows they are about to lose. I hope that he can pull it out, but I am getting very skeptical about this one.
Internal polls are just as good, and probably better than public polls (after all, they are how parties decide how to spend their money). However, they are selectively released. If he was down by 5, they might have sat on it, but this might help GOTV.
Exactly Ralph. During the 2012 election, while all of those polls showed Romney neck and neck with the President, their internal polls never showed that close of a race, and in the end the President’s internal polls turned out to be much closer to the results of the election than any external poll did.
I disagree. Perhaps they released more, but the one page memo is a simple top line report of their findings. Did they release the questions, the order, any “push polling”, etc.? I think that there are two types of internal polls - those that give a very real look into the dynamics of the race at that moment and others that are made to create an impression for the voters. In my opinion, the ones released at this stage of the campaign tend to fall into the latter category. Just my two cents, and I hope that I am wrong.