Poll shows close races for president and Senate seats in Georgia
As November’s election draws closer, a new poll shows tight races for president and both Senate seats in Georgia, with President Donald Trump leading Democratic nominee Joe Biden by just 1 percentage point in his bid for reelection.
According to the Monmouth University survey, Trump receives support from 47 percent of voters to Biden’s 46 percent, a small decrease for the former vice president since July that lies within the poll’s margin of error.
But the poll found several drastic demographic swings behind the relatively stable race.
Among voters over the age of 65, Trump has overtaken Biden — who led the age bracket 52 percent to 48 percent in July — and now leads the Democrat by 61 percent to 36 percent.
Biden has made gains with younger age groups, however, and now has a 54 percent to 43 percent lead among voters ages 50 to 64 after trailing the president by 2 points in July. Among voters under 50, Biden has pulled away from a 46 percent tie with Trump in January to build a 5-point lead over Trump.
The Monmouth survey also employed two likely voter models — one with a higher projected turnout than in 2016 and one with a lower projected turnout than 2016. Trump’s lead grew by a point in the higher turnout model, and it increased to 5 points in the lower turnout model.
Georgia is one of a handful of former GOP strongholds that has emerged as a potential battleground in November, despite Trump winning the state by 5 points in 2016.
Democrats have insisted that Georgia is in play again, despite not having given its 16 Electoral College votes to a Democrat in nearly 30 years, pointing to the extremely close gubernatorial race in 2018 and shifting demographic trends.
In one Senate race, Republican incumbent David Perdue leads his Democratic rival Jon Ossoff 48 percent to 42 percent, the same margin by which Perdue led in a July Monmouth poll.
In a special election for Georgia’s second Senate seat, the poll shows a three-way virtual tie in the so-called jungle primary between GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed to the seat earlier this year by Gov. Brian Kemp, GOP Rep. Doug Collins and Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock.
Loeffler leads the pack with 23 percent support, followed by Collins with 22 percent support and Warnock with 21 percent. Matt Lieberman, also a Democrat, registered 11 percent support in the poll. The survey represents a major upswing for Warnock, who is backed by Senate Democrats’ campaign arm — Wednesday’s poll shows a 12-point climb for the Atlanta-based pastor since July.
The survey underscores the certainty that the special election, which is set to take place on Nov. 3 along with the other races, will head to a runoff in January between the top two candidates. It also raises the possibility that January’s runoff could be a two-party race, rather than a showdown of conservatives between Loeffler and Collins.
The Monmouth University poll surveyed 402 registered voters in Georgia by phone from Sept. 17-21. Results from the survey have a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.
