A new poll of the U.S. Senate runoff in Georgia shows incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock with a five-point lead over Republican challenger Herschel Walker.
The UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion’s poll surveyed 1,322 registered Georgia voters, finding Warnock with 51% support to Walker’s 46%.
The results show Warnock performing much better among Democratic voters than Walker does among Republicans. The incumbent is leading among his party’s voters 97%-3% while Republicans are going for Walker 90%-8%.
Meanwhile, the same poll also measured whether Georgians would opt for Joe Biden or Donald Trump in a potential rematch in the 2024 presidential election, finding Biden with a four-point lead (47%-43%).
Similarly, Biden’s margin comes from much stronger performance among his base. He carries Democrats 94%-3% while Trump carries Republicans 83%-4% with about 13% of GOP voters saying they would vote for someone else or that they are undecided.
The UMass Lowell poll was conducted Nov. 18-28 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.
The UMass poll comes shortly after another positive measure for Warnock. On Dec. 1, an Emerson College Polling/The Hill survey found him leading Walker 49%-47%, which is within that poll’s margin of error.
The Warnock vs. Walker race advanced to a runoff after Warnock earned a few tenths of a point more than Walker in the popular vote but failed to secure a majority of the vote with third-party candidates on the ballot. Next week, Warnock and Walker will be the only candidates on the ballot.
Warnock was elected to the U.S. Senate two years ago under similar circumstances. He was the top vote-getter in the 2020 special election for the U.S. Senate seat he currently holds, but he failed to get a majority of the vote on the crowded ballot. In the runoff, he defeated appointed incumbent Kelly Loeffler 51%-49%.
The Georgia race will no longer decide which party will control the U.S. Senate, since Democrats pulled out narrow victories in Arizona and New Mexico, securing 50 seats with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaker vote. Still, both parties are putting their full weight into capturing the increasingly purple state.
