Dem Poll Shows Tea Partier Inching Ahead Of Sen. Cochran
A new poll by Democratic pollster Chism Strategies has found state Sen. Chris McDaniel (R-MS) just barely leading Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) in the Mississippi Republican Senate primary.
The new poll, obtained by TPM from a Democratic operative, found McDaniel leading Cochran, 46 percent to 44 percent among 813 likely Republican primary voters. Another 7.9 percent said they were undecided and a tiny 1.4 percent said they would vote for Republican Thomas Carey, who's also running in the primary. The poll's margin of error is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
Chism Strategies has done polling for former Rep. Travis Childers (D-MS), the expected Democratic nominee in the Senate race.
The poll's findings conflict with GOP pollster Harper Polling's latest poll on the race which showed Cochran leading McDaniel 45 percent to 40 percent.
Those polls are a rare pair of surveys that have come out since news broke that a pro-McDaniel political blogger was arrested for photographing Cochran's wife for an anti-Cochran video. McDaniel has been hit by a wave of questions about that break-in and any possible links his campaign has to the blogger, and the district attorney has said no one, including anyone from the McDaniel campaign, has yet been cleared in the investigation.
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