Governor's race is toss up, Ross off to good start

Published October 31, 2015

by Tom Jensen, Public Policy Polling, October 29, 2015.

PPP's monthly North Carolina poll finds both Roy Cooper and Deborah Ross polling a little better following their official candidacy announcements over the last few weeks.

Our monthly look at the North Carolina Governor's race finds Cooper edging Pat McCrory 44/43. Cooper has now had nominal advantages 4 of the last 5 months, although McCrory had the upper hand 44/41 in September. The key to the Governor's race being so competitive continues to be McCrory's unpopularity. Only 36% of voters approve of the job he's doing to 49% who disapprove, making it 28 months now since we found him with a positive approval rating. Cooper is still unknown to a plurality of voters in the state- 48% have no opinion about him- but among those who do have one 31% see him positively to 21% with a negative opinion.

We also took our first look at the Democratic primary for Governor, but it doesn't look like much of a contest. Cooper leads challenger Ken Spaulding 58/13.  Cooper has majority supports from liberals, moderates, men, women, seniors, white voters, and perhaps most notably has a 56/19 advantage over Spaulding with African Americans. For whatever it's worth, Spaulding trails McCrory by 15 points at 46/31.

In the Senate race Richard Burr continues to have his requisite mediocre approval numbers with only 29% of voters giving him good marks to 39% who disapprove. Deborah Ross is now polling within 4 points of Burr, 43/39, following the announcement of her candidacy. Burr has wider leads over the other Democrats in the field- it's 44/35 over Kevin Griffin and 45/34 over Chris Rey. None of the Democratic candidates have greater than 27% name recognition at this point.

Ross starts out as a big favorite in the Democratic primary, polling at 33% to 16% for Griffin and 6% for  Rey although certainly with 45% of voters undecided there's still a long way to go. Ross leads the Democratic hopefuls by every subgroup of ideology, gender, race, and age.

The bottom line on the 2 big North Carolina races remains the same: the Governor's race is a toss up, and Burr is favored in the Senate race but has weak approval numbers that make him potentially vulnerable as the Democratic hopefuls become better known- if it turns out to be a good year for their party.

Full results here

October 31, 2015 at 10:39 am
Richard L Bunce says:

Only poll that counts is the election. Another poll that does not include the non response rate and details of how the raw data was manipulated.