Polls Up In The Air For NV-02 Special Election

NV-02 candidates Mark Amodei (R) and Kate Marshall (D)
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The Nevada NV-02 special election, being held after Republican incumbent Dean Heller was appointed to the U.S. Senate, could be going down to the wire — or it could be an easy blowout hold for the Republicans, depending on which poll you read. The election is being held September 13.

A new Daily Kos/Public Policy Polling (D) survey gives Republican former state Sen. Mark Amodei 43%, Democratic state Treasurer Kate Marshall 42%, American Independent Party candidate Timothy Fasano 3%, and independent Helmuth Lehmann 3%. The survey of likely voters was conducted from August 18-21, and has a 4% margin of error.

By contrast, a recent survey from Magellan Strategies (R) gave Amodei a lead of 48%-35%, with Fasano at 4% and Lehmann at 2%. This survey of likely voters was conducted from August 15-16, and has a 3.82% margin of error.

As Daily Kos’s analysis points out, the two polls differ greatly in the partisan self-identification of the sampled respondents. The PPP survey sample is 41% Republican, 37% Democratic, and 22% independent. By contrast, the Magellan poll is 48% Republican, 38% Democrats, and 14% independent — thus accounting for the difference in the result, depending on turnout patterns.

To be clear, this is a historically Republican district, the reddest in the state. It voted for John McCain by less than a one point margin in the 2008 Democratic wave, but before that it voted 57%-41% for George W. Bush in 2004. And even Sharron Angle, the disastrous GOP Senate nominee in 2010 who blew a solid pick-up opportunity for the party against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, carried the district by a 50%-43% margin.

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