Alaska Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kelly Tshibaka would defeat Sen. Lisa Murkowski if the election were held today, a new poll shows. The survey, conducted by the respected firm Cygnal for the Tshibaka campaign, uses Alaska’s new ranked choice voting system and demonstrates that Tshibaka would beat Murkowski in the final tabulation by nearly two points, 50.8% to 49.2%.
“With only modest investments in advertising by her campaign in 2021, Kelly Tshibaka has tripled her name identification over the last year and positioned herself to be the next U.S. Senator from Alaska,” pollster Brock McCleary wrote in a memo to the Tshibaka campaign. “Based on the strength of her grassroots popularity, Tshibaka has united the center-right of the Alaska electorate in rejection of incumbent Lisa Murkowski’s re-election bid.”
Since voters will rank four candidates in the November general election, the poll included Tshibaka, Murkowski, a generic Democrat, and a generic Libertarian candidate. Using the ranked choice process, the poll eliminated the candidate who finished fourth in the initial vote and redistributed those votes based on voters’ second-ranked choices. The process continued until one candidate reached 50 percent plus one vote.
It's important to note that Murkowski has never achieved 50% of the vote in any of her U.S. Senate elections.
Key findings:
In the initial first-choice vote, Tshibaka crushed Murkowski by 45.4% to 28.7%.
Tshibaka won 84% of Republicans and leads with both men and women.
Tshibaka dominated Murkowski among both self-described Trump Republicans and Traditional Republicans.
A strong majority of undecided voters have an unfavorable opinion of Murkowski.
A whopping 87% of Alaska Republicans hold an unfavorable view of Murkowski.
President Joe Biden is extremely unpopular in Alaska, with 61.1% of voters having an unfavorable view of him versus 37.2% who hold a favorable opinion.
The poll was conducted March 14-16, 2022 and used a sample of 500 likely general election voters in Alaska. It has a margin of error of +/- 4.21%.
Cygnal is an award-winning international public opinion and predictive analytics firm that pioneered multi-mode polling, peer-to-peer text collection, and Political Emotive Analysis. Cygnal is named the #1 Republican private pollster by Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight two cycles running, as well as the #1 most accurate polling and research firm in the country for 2018 by The New York Times. Its team members have worked in 47 states and countries on more than 2,100 corporate, public affairs, and political campaigns.
Images of the memo are below:
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