Poll Watch: SurveyUSA finds Patty Murray ahead of Tiffany Smiley by eighteen points

New pub­lic polling in Wash­ing­ton’s 2022 Unit­ed States Sen­ate race was released this week by well-regard­ed poll­ster Sur­veyUSA that shows Demo­c­ra­t­ic Unit­ed States Sen­a­tor Pat­ty Mur­ray com­fort­ably ahead of Repub­li­can chal­lenger Tiffany Smi­ley with less than a month to go until the August Top Two election.

51% of five hun­dred and nine­ty-six like­ly vot­ers inter­viewed online from July 6th through July 10th by Sur­veyUSA expressed sup­port for Mur­ray, while 33% backed Smi­ley and 16% were undecided.

“The eigh­teen-point spread is the best result for Mur­ray in any of the half-dozen pub­licly released polls in the last year,” wrote The Seat­tle Times’ David Gutman.

This is indeed the best spread yet for Mur­ray in pub­lic polling, match­ing what Sur­veyUSA found all the way back in the autumn of last year, and it’s due to a weak­er num­ber for Smi­ley than we’ve seen in any of our surveys.

Half of those half dozen pub­licly released polls are NPI’s: togeth­er with our part­ner Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Polling, we polled the U.S. Sen­ate race in Novem­ber of 2021, Feb­ru­ary of 2022, and again just last month, as well as in May of 2021.

Our most recent find­ing (June of 2022) found Mur­ray at 51%. That’s the exact same num­ber she received in Sur­veyUSA’s poll. Where our polling and Sur­veyUSA’s diverge is Tiffany Smi­ley’s lev­el of sup­port. Our polls have found few­er unde­cid­ed vot­ers and more Smi­ley sup­port­ers than Sur­veyUSA’s have.

I say polls (plur­al) because this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this divergence.

Last autumn, Sur­veyUSA did a poll of the Sen­ate race just for KING5, and found an eigh­teen point lead for Mur­ray. Then, as now, the per­cent­age Mur­ray got was pret­ty close to ours, but Smi­ley’s per­cent­age was a bit low­er, which result­ed in a big­ger spread for Mur­ray, who has won five con­sec­u­tive Sen­ate elections.

How NPI/PPP’s polling com­pares to Sur­veyUSA’s polling

Smi­ley is Mur­ray’s best fund­ed chal­lenger, with mil­lions and mil­lions raised, and has the back­ing of the Wash­ing­ton State Repub­li­can Par­ty and the Nation­al Repub­li­can Sen­a­to­r­i­al Com­mit­tee. She’s expect­ed to get through the August Top Two elec­tion and become Mur­ray’s gen­er­al elec­tion opponent.

But her path to vic­to­ry is steep. Wash­ing­ton has­n’t elect­ed a Repub­li­can to the Unit­ed States Sen­ate since 1994. That’s an almost thir­ty year drought for Repub­li­cans in Sen­ate elec­tions. And, as David Gut­man’s recent report­ing demon­strates, Smi­ley is not run­ning on any spe­cif­ic ideas for strength­en­ing the coun­try. Her cam­paign is the mod­ern def­i­n­i­tion of boil­er­plate. She’s try­ing to stoke anger with Biden and Mur­ray and ride that sen­ti­ment to victory.

But that isn’t the way to build an elec­toral major­i­ty in Wash­ing­ton. Most vot­ers in the Ever­green State vote Demo­c­ra­t­ic for fed­er­al and statewide exec­u­tive depart­ment offices. Kim Wyman won three straight Sec­re­tary of State con­tests dur­ing the Obama/Trump/Biden years thanks to the sup­port of some Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ers. Those vot­ers were com­fort­able split­ting a tick­et in that case, but do they want Wash­ing­ton to have a sen­a­tor who puts Mitch McConnell back in power?

The avail­able pub­lic polling sug­gests the answer is no.

Inter­est­ing­ly, inde­pen­dent vot­ers are even­ly split between Mur­ray and Smi­ley in KING5’s sur­vey despite Smi­ley’s some­what mediocre over­all lev­el of support.

Each can­di­date gets 38% of inde­pen­dent vot­ers with 24% undecided.

Demo­c­ra­t­ic and Repub­li­can vot­ers are over­whelm­ing­ly for their par­ty’s stan­dard bear­er as you might expect, but Mur­ray’s edge with Democ­rats is slight­ly bet­ter than Smi­ley’s advan­tage with Republicans.

In our polling, Smi­ley has done much bet­ter with inde­pen­dent vot­ers, but that has not been enough to make her com­pet­i­tive with Murray.

Again, Wash­ing­ton is a Demo­c­ra­t­ic state. It’s out of reach for a Repub­li­can can­di­date like Smi­ley bar­ring unusu­al cir­cum­stances like crossover support.

Sur­veyUSA, a long­time part­ner of KING5, also teamed up with The Seat­tle Times,  the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton’s Cen­ter for an Informed Pub­lic, and Wash­ing­ton State Uni­ver­si­ty’s Mur­row Col­lege of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion for this survey.

“Sur­veyUSA inter­viewed 825 Wash­ing­ton State adults online 07/06/22 through 07/10/22, using sam­ple pro­vid­ed by Lucid Hold­ings LLC of New Orleans,” the firm advis­es in its method­ol­o­gy note.

“Of the adults, 731 were iden­ti­fied as being reg­is­tered to vote. Of the reg­is­tered vot­ers, 596 were deter­mined by Sur­veyUSA to be like­ly to vote in the Novem­ber elec­tion for Unit­ed States Sen­ate and were asked the ques­tions which fol­low. The pool of adult sur­vey respon­dents was weight­ed to US Cen­sus tar­gets for gen­der, age, race, edu­ca­tion, and home ownership.”

Bal­lots for Wash­ing­ton’s August Top Two elec­tion were mailed out yes­ter­day and are due back no lat­er than Tues­day, August 2nd at 8 PM Pacif­ic Time.