All told, three Senate polls came out on Thursday, all of which show that if the election were held today, GOP Senate candidate Dan Sullivan would beat Sen. Mark Begich by varying degrees. Anchorage-based Dittman Research released a poll of 800 Alaskans paid for by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has endorsed Sullivan, showing him up by 6 percentage points. Rasmussen Reports, which is known as a conservative-leaning pollster, showed Sullivan up by 5 points.
Another local pollster, Marc Hellenthal, has Sullivan up 4.5 percent in a head-to-head. Hellenthal polled 400 Alaskans between Sept. 12-24. The poll was not paid for by any Senate candidate or group associated with the Senate race. Although his, like the others, shows Sullivan up, “All is not doom and gloom” for Begich, Hellenthal said. Begich has a wider margin of certain voters than does Sullivan. Begich has 35.4 percent of voters who feel strongly or moderately strong about voting for him, compared to 33.4 percent for Sullivan.
Here’s a screen grab from Hellenthal’s polls. The “general election,” category is Hellenthal’s prediction if the undecideds were divvied up between the three candidates:
In other Senate news, The Rothenberg Report, widely considered one of the best political predictors in the business, moved Begich from “toss up/tilts Democrat” to “pure tossup” before the new polls were released. Here’s what he says about the race:
Mark Begich is widely credited with running the best Democratic race in the country, and he may be ahead of challenger Dan Sullivan by a couple of points. But Begich remains well under the 50 percent mark, and Alaska’s strongly Republican bent means the senator has no room for error.
Contact Amanda Coyne at amandamcoyne@yahoo.com
Ha and I’m the jerk who didn’t finish reading your article because I was so irritated. I need coffee.
It is factually incorrect to say, “If the election were held today, Sullivan would beat Begich.” Did you even read the poll? Add the numbers yourself? The numbers add up to 86%, as I recall. That means 14% are undecided. That means that 14%–if election were held today–would sway it one way or another. And that means there is still no way of knowing who’d win at this point. I suggest revising that misleading sentence and replace it with a true fact that it is still quite literally a tossup. And September.