Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch has opened up a 9-point edge over Republican Mark Sanford in the special election playing out in South Carolina’s First Congressional District, according to the latest survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling released Monday.
Fifty percent of voters in the district said they will vote for Colbert Busch, the sister of satirist Stephen Colbert, in the May 7 special election while 41 percent said they will vote for Sanford, South Carolina’s former governor who resigned in 2009 after it was revealed that he had been visiting his longtime mistress in Argentina when he disappeared from the state. Only 3 percent said they will vote for Green Party candidate Eugene Platt.
PPP’s previous survey of the race last month and an internal poll from the Colbert Busch campaign released earlier this month each showed a toss-up between the two major party candidates. But it’s been a tumultuous past week for Sanford, who’s seen the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee announce that it will not spend any additional money on his race and his ex-wife, Jenny Sanford, file a lawsuit in which she accused him of trespassing and violating their divorce agreement. Moreover, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee last week released a brutal ad mocking Sanford for his 2009 mistress scandal.
Those events prompted Sanford to take out a full page newspaper ad in the Sunday edition of the Post & Courier of Charleston, S.C. in which he reflected on his “rough week” and invoked the Battle of the Alamo in saying he’s both “outgunned” and “outmanned.”
