Politics & Government

New Poll Shows Darling Leading by 5 Points in Recall Race

Pasch campaign remains optimistic as Darling appears to be closing gap in 8th Senate District battle.

Editor's Note: Story updated at 7:30 p.m. July 26 to include comment from Darling's campaign.

While Rep. Sandy Pasch (D-Whitefish Bay) is slowly creeping up on Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) in the fight for the North Shore Senate seat, Darling still holds a 5-point lead over her challenger, according to a new poll by the Democratic blog, Daily Kos.

The poll, conducted by Public Policy Polling, says 52 percent of the likely voters will support Darling in the Aug. 9 8th Senate District recall election, with 47 percent backing Pasch. One percent said they remain undecided.

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The Daily Kos poll comes in the wake of that showed Pasch leading Darling by a margin of 47 percent to 46 percent.

That poll of 350 likely voters, conducted for the party by the Mellman Group, showed Pasch picking up an additional 8 percentage points since a similar poll in May, with Darling losing 2 percentage points.

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The number of voters who said they were undecided dropped from 12 percent in May to 7 percent in July.

Darling's campaign was upbeat about the incumbent's lead in the Daily Kos poll.

“We’re very pleased to see the recently released poll numbers, but we know it’s all about turnout,” said Andrew Davis, Darling's campaign manager. “The Darling campaign has taken each day of this recall campaign very seriously and Senator Darling is working hard to make sure every Darling supporter gets to the polls on Aug. 9.”

Pasch's campaign also saw positive in the earlier poll numbers that showed her narrowing the gap with Darling.

"We are very encouraged," Gillian Morris, press secretary for the state's Democratic Party said. "It's going to obviously be a close race. We are on the ground, going door-to-door, talking to voters, getting some very encouraging words and results. We're pretty excited.

"It'll be all about who decides to get out and turn out on election day," Morris added. "They're (voters) not used to getting out and voting in August. We are very encouraged, this obviously only continues what we're seeing on the ground that it's going to be a very close race."


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