Toomey maintains lead over Sestak, polls show
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With six weeks to go before the election, a trio of new surveys has found former Rep. Pat Toomey, the Republican, with consistent single-digit leads over Rep. Joe Sestak among likely voters in Pennsylvania's Senate race.
The Republican's margins among likely voters ranged from 7 percentage points in a Quinnipiac University survey, 8 points in a Fox News poll, and 5 points in a poll conducted for CNN and Time Magazine. While Mr. Sestak remained in plausible striking distance in each set of findings, his challenge was compounded by the sharp erosion in popularity for President Barack Obama and his signature health care policies.
Despite an increasing barrage of television advertising, the combined results suggested little recent movement in a race in which the Republican has enjoyed leads in the high single digits for months. The last time Mr. Sestak was ahead in a major public poll was in late May, when Rasmussen found him leading 46 percent to 42 percent just after his hard-fought primary victory over Sen. Arlen Specter. The Republican's average lead among the surveys aggregated on pollster.com was 47.4 percent to 39.3 percent.
The Quinnipiac University survey showed Mr. Toomey leading Mr. Sestak 50 percent to 43 percent among 647 likely voters interviewed between Sept. 15 and Sept. 19. Quinnipiac has been assessing this contest regularly since last year. This week's was the first poll in which the researchers based their findings on likely voters rather than all registered voters. Most polling organizations employ a similar shift in focus as the election draws nearer. The determination, which varies from pollster to pollster, is typically based on the respondents' answers to questions that typically include voting history and how certain they are that they will cast a ballot in November.
First Published September 23, 2010 12:00 am
