NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Nashville Banner) — This story was originally published by the Nashville Banner. Sign up for their newsletter.
Internal polling by Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s campaign for governor shows she leads the race for governor of Tennessee by 17 points ahead of Thursday’s primary election, directly disputing other poll numbers published this week.
Blackburn’s poll of likely Republican primary voters, conducted by Fabrizio, Lee & Associates, found the senator and presumed frontrunner led the Republican candidates with 42 percent, followed by Congressman John Rose with 25 percent and state Rep. Monty Fritts with 22 percent. Those numbers show a decline for Blackburn, who once dominated the race with a 30-50 point lead, and gains for both Rose and Fritts. Still, the poll suggests Blackburn has a comfortable margin with less than a week until the primary.
As both frontrunners continue to drop new ads and conflicting polls, and Blackburn advocates for closed primaries while Rose does long-form TV interviews, it’s clear that neither candidate is letting up before the polls close.
While the firm, which does presidential polling for the Republican National Committee, is generally viewed as legitimate, the numbers were originally withheld by the Blackburn campaign when another pollster, technically independent of Rose but with connections to him, found that the congressman was within striking distance of Blackburn earlier this week.
The Blackburn campaign initially declined to publish the numbers received on Wednesday, but provided them Friday after the more Rose-positive poll was published.
The earlier poll, completed by OnMessage Public Strategies, listed Blackburn at 34.5 percentage points, Rose at 31 and Fritts at 25.6.
Both pollsters say they surveyed 800-850 likely Tennessee Republican primary voters within the last week of July with a 3.5 percent margin of error. OnMessage reported 9 percent were undecided, while the Blackburn poll reported 11 percent undecided. Fact sheets from both polls are linked in this story.
Whether the 3.5 percent gap reported by OnMessage or 17 points from the senator’s campaign, Blackburn’s lead has dwindled over the summer, due in part to aggressive ad spending by Rose, who is largely bankrolling his own campaign, but also a blow to Blackburn’s favorability tied to a lack of public appearances and debate.
While the OnMessage poll showed 49 percent of the likely Republican voters surveyed viewed Blackburn favorably, the internal poll found it to be 69 percent.
Similar to the OnMessage poll, Blackburn’s internal poll has Fritts at 22 percent, showing a swell in support since this spring.
The outcome of the primary will double as a referendum on the legitimacy of both pollsters, and the disparate numbers highlight how unreliable polling is, particularly in low-turnout elections like the statewide primary.
As of Friday, with one day of early voting left to go, 322,000 voters had cast primary ballots statewide, increasing by less than one percent since the same period during the last open governor’s race in 2018.
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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