Republican candidate Herschel Walker leads Democrat incumbent U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock in a new poll 49 percent to 45 percent in a potential November general election match-up.
The poll, conducted by Emerson College Polling/The Hill, shows that Walker has a towering lead in the race for the GOP nomination for Georgia’s U.S. Senate seat. Walker polls at 57 percent, while closest competitor Gary Black trails him by 44 percentage points. Sixteen percent of that sample is undecided.
In the Georgia governor’s race, Republican incumbent Brian Kemp leads former U.S. Senator David Perdue by 11 percentage points, 43 percent to 32 percent. Of that sample, 17 percent are undecided. If neither candidate receives 50 percent plus one vote in the primary, there would be a runoff. In that scenario, Kemp leads Perdue by five percentage points, 44 percent to 39 percent, with 16 percent undecided.
In the Republican primary race for Secretary of State, incumbent Republican Brad Raffensperger leads his primary challenger U.S. Representative Jody Hice (R-GA-10) 29 percent to 26 percent. Former President Donald Trump endorsed Hice.
Georgia’s primaries are scheduled to occur on May 24. If a primary runoff is necessary, it would occur on June 21.
The poll also tested potential November general election match-ups for governor. Kemp has a seven-point lead over Stacey Abrams, 51 percent to 44 percent, with 5 percent undecided. Abrams trails Perdue by five points in a hypothetical match-up, 44 percent to 49 percent, with 7 percent undecided.
Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, said, “Abrams holds the majority of support in the general election among voters under 50, while Kemp and Perdue have a strong majority of voters over 50. Abrams’ chances in November depend in large part on whether or not these younger voters turn out.”
According to Emerson College, the “poll was conducted April 1-3, 2022. The general election sample consisted of registered voters in Georgia, n=1,013 with a Credibility Interval (CI) similar to a poll’s margin of error (MOE) of +/- 3 percentage points. The Republican primary sample consisted of likely voters, n=509, with a Credibility Interval (CI) similar to a poll’s margin of error (MOE) of +/- 4.3 percentage points.”
The college also explained how it weighed the data and collected the sample.
“The data sets were weighted by gender, age, education, race, and region based on 2020 turnout modeling. It is important to remember that subsets based on gender, age, party breakdown, ethnicity, and region carry with them higher margins of error, as the sample size is reduced. Data was collected using a cellphone sample of SMS-to-web, an online panel provided by Amazon Mechanical Turk, and an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system of landlines.”
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Aaron Gulbransen is a reporter at The Georgia Star News and The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected]. Follow Aaron on GETTR, Twitter, and Parler.
Photo “Herschel Walker” by Herschel Walker.
