Democrat Jon Ossoff leads Republican Karen Handel by less than two points in the special election to fill an open U.S. House seat in Georgia, according to a new poll released by WSB-TV on Thursday night.
Ossoff earned 49.1 percent support and Handel earned 47.6 percent support among likely voters, according to the poll, which was conducted by Landmark Communications. The previous WSB-TV poll, conducted in early May, had showed Handel leading Ossoff by 2.5 percentage points.
The survey also showed a reverse gender divide in the race, with Ossoff leading among female voters by about 10 points and Handel leading among male voters by about 10 points.
The poll released Thursday surveyed 500 likely voters via phone and online May 30-31 with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
Keep tweeting, Donald. Just. Keep. Tweeting.
It’s not really a reverse gender divide. As usual (recently in the US at least) the women are in favor of the sane candidate, the men are in favor of the incompetent loon.
This represents a big turnaround for Ossoff from the last poll from this pollster. Where this poll and SUSA align is that Ossoff is winning Indies and unaffiliated voters by strong margins. So even if Handel gets her % of GOP voters up, she might still lose. The other point is that Ossoff did get a fair number of GOP net crossovers in round 1. Those voters seem to be sticking with him for round 2. One trend that Wasserman and others have noted is that in the special elections to date, the Dem candidate is getting a higher percentage of HRC voters than the GOP candidate is of Trump voters. If that trend holds and Ossoff cashes in on unaffiliated/Indies and new/infrequent voters, he can win. Not predicting anything yet other than it will be close, but I find the trend agreeable to this point.
The only thing that matters is turnout. Please, Trump, keep pissing off D’s and Independents.
This poll isn’t very good…
It’s hard to get good numbers in a small state race like this, which is why the margin for error is 4.4%. The Dems need to keep driving turnout, especially in light of doing 10 points better than they should have in Montana. Flipping these seats early will scare the shit out of Republicans leading into 2018, and that wall between Trump and public opinion will erode quickly.