Shock internal Graham Platner poll shows tight race against Susan Collins as scandals pile up
WASHINGTON — A shock internal poll for scandal-scarred Maine Senate hopeful Graham Platner shows a possible warning sign in his quest to beat incumbent Sen.Susan Collins.The internal Public Policy Polling poll had Platner beating Collins (R-Maine) 49% to 45% among registered voters, which is barely outside the 3.8 percentage point margin of error.
Roughly 6% of registered voters in the survey were undecided.But that’s considerably below the 7.8 percentage point lead he has over Collins in the latest RealClearPolitics polling aggregate, which only has polls from before the sexting scandal broke.Crucially, the RCP aggregate had Collins down by about 5 percentage points in 2020.She won reelection by 8.6 points.
PPP largely conducts polling for various candidates within the Democratic Party.The internal poll was revealed in a Platner campaign memo about the state of the race amid a string of controversies.Platner’s campaign painted a rosy picture about his standing in the race, claiming the poll is “slightly stronger” than a prior internal one it conducted in mid-May.
It’s not immediately clear what the poll from last month said and whether they used the same polling firm.“The horse race is consistent with — in fact, slightly stronger than – the campaign’s own most recent internal polling from mid-May, reinforcing the durability of Platner’s lead rather than reflecting a single favorable outlier,” the campaign said in the memo, which has been widely circulated.The oyster farmer’s team also touted an 18% increase in small-dollar donations relative to last week, including a 27% uptick among small-dollar donors in Maine.“Across the board – the poll numbers, the fundraising, the conversations with voters — all signs point in our favor,” the memo argued.That happy talk comes in the wake of a bombshell story about Platner sexting other women while married.
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