Poll Watch: Elway finds solid lead for Murray; Steve Hobbs barely ahead of Julie Anderson

Crosscut/Elway today pub­lished find­ings from a statewide poll look­ing ahead to the Novem­ber 2022 gen­er­al elec­tion that sug­gest Democ­rats remain poised to do well, as they showed they were capa­ble of in last mon­th’s Top Two election.

Notably, Demo­c­ra­t­ic Unit­ed States Sen­a­tor Pat­ty Mur­ray leads Repub­li­can chal­lenger Tiffany Smi­ley 50% to 37%, with 12% undecided.

Those num­bers are almost iden­ti­cal to our Novem­ber 2021 statewide poll, which found Mur­ray at 50%, Smi­ley at 37%, and 13% unde­cid­ed. In our sub­se­quent statewide polls, Mur­ray has main­tained an advan­tage over Smi­ley, always gar­ner­ing major­i­ty sup­port. Like­wise, in last mon­th’s Top Two elec­tion, Mur­ray won a major­i­ty. She is on track for reelec­tion in a few weeks.

Poll­ster Stu­art Elway char­ac­ter­ized this year’s races as hav­ing “tight­ened up, which is typ­i­cal at this time of year as more vot­ers start to focus on the election.”

How­ev­er, our own polling sug­gests the tight­en­ing in Wash­ing­ton State’s U.S. Sen­ate race hap­pened months ago. We’ve asked about the U.S. Sen­ate race four times this cycle so far: in May of 2021, Novem­ber of 2021, Feb­ru­ary of 2022, and June of 2022. Mur­ray’s lead was six­teen points to start, dropped to thir­teen in Novem­ber of 2021, shrank to nine in Feb­ru­ary, and widened to eleven in June.

If Mur­ray’s advan­tage is indeed about thir­teen points at this junc­ture, that is a bet­ter spread for her than what we have found in either of our polls this year.

Tiffany Smi­ley had plen­ty of com­pe­ti­tion to take on Pat­ty Mur­ray in the August Top Two elec­tion, but in the gen­er­al elec­tion she’ll be Mur­ray’s sole opponent.

If we add up the votes received by every can­di­date iden­ti­fy­ing in some way as a Demo­c­rat last month (includ­ing Mur­ray, of course) and then com­pare those with the votes received by every can­di­date iden­ti­fy­ing in some way as a Repub­li­can (includ­ing Smi­ley), we see a spread of between thir­teen and four­teen points (55.3% for all Democ­rats, 41.47% for all Republicans).

A thir­teen point spread in Wash­ing­ton’s U.S. Sen­ate race a lit­tle over a month after cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is entire­ly con­sis­tent with what we saw in the actu­al elec­tion a few weeks ago that mil­lions of peo­ple vot­ed in. There won’t be a “not sure” option on the gen­er­al elec­tion bal­lot, of course, but it won’t be sur­pris­ing if Mur­ray gets some of those unde­cid­ed vot­ers and Smi­ley gets some.

Mur­ray’s mar­gin over Smi­ley may not as be as great as her mar­gin over Repub­li­can (now inde­pen­dent) Chris Vance in 2016, but she appears on course to pre­vail more com­fort­ably over Smi­ley than she did over Dino Rossi in 2010.

Since we don’t know the future, we can’t say what will hap­pen, only what might hap­pen, but this does seem like the most prob­a­ble scenario.

Two Repub­li­can-aligned poll­sters have recent­ly put out data show­ing Smi­ley with­in sin­gle dig­its of Mur­ray. This new find­ing from Crosscut/Elway con­firms that those sur­veys are out­liers. The Trafal­gar sur­vey, in par­tic­u­lar, is just not cred­i­ble, as I explained here on The Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate a few weeks ago.

Mean­while, on the gener­ic bal­lot, Elway found that Democ­rats con­tin­ue to enjoy an advan­tage. “Of those sur­veyed, 49% said they want­ed Democ­rats to keep con­trol of Con­gress, includ­ing 39% who said that was ‘impor­tant.’ Anoth­er 41% said they’d like Repub­li­cans to take at least one cham­ber of Con­gress, includ­ing 29% who called it ‘impor­tant’ to do so,” Cross­cut’s Joseph O’Sul­li­van report­ed.

The spe­cial elec­tion for Sec­re­tary of State is a dif­fer­ent sto­ry than the U.S. Sen­ate race. There, Crosscut/Elway found Demo­c­ra­t­ic incum­bent Steve Hobbs bare­ly ahead of inde­pen­dent chal­lenger Julie Ander­son, the cur­rent Pierce Coun­ty Audi­tor. Hobbs got 31%, while Ander­son got 29% and 40% were undecided.

Ander­son end­ed up as Hobbs’ gen­er­al elec­tion oppo­nent due to Repub­li­can vote-split­ting. Repub­li­can can­di­dates Mark Milos­cia, Bob Hag­glu­nd, and Kei­th Wag­oner frac­tured the Repub­li­can vote so effec­tive­ly that they can­celled each oth­er out, set­ting up a gen­er­al elec­tion bal­lot with no Repub­li­can stan­dard bear­er on it.

Hobbs and Ander­son are unknown to many vot­ers across Wash­ing­ton in part because they are run­ning statewide in a gen­er­al elec­tion for the first time.

Hobbs, appoint­ed by Gov­er­nor Jay Inslee last autumn, is the first Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sec­re­tary of State in more than fifty years. To retain the office, he needs to at a min­i­mum con­sol­i­date the sup­port of Demo­c­ra­t­ic and Demo­c­ra­t­ic-lean­ing vot­ers, who are a major­i­ty of the elec­torate in Washington.

Hobbs received only 42% of the vote in Sno­homish Coun­ty, home to the 44th Dis­trict he used to rep­re­sent, and only 30% of the vote in Pierce Coun­ty, which Ander­son rep­re­sents, in the Top Two elec­tion. He did much bet­ter in King Coun­ty, gar­ner­ing over 55% of the vote against Ander­son and six others.

But as Kim Wyman showed repeat­ed­ly, it’s pos­si­ble to win an elec­tion for Sec­re­tary of State while los­ing King Coun­ty. She did it three times, in fact: in 2012, in 2016, and in 2020. Ander­son will try to use Wyman’s elec­toral recipe — Slade Gor­ton’s boa con­stric­tor strat­e­gy — to upset Hobbs this year.

How­ev­er, Hobbs can hold Ander­son off if he per­forms well enough in the state’s swing coun­ties, which include not only Pierce and Sno­homish, but also What­com, Skag­it, Island, Kit­sap, and Thurston. Sno­homish will be cru­cial: Hobbs is from there and Sno­homish can be eas­i­er for a Demo­c­rat to cap­ture than Pierce is.

We at NPI will be polling both of these con­tests next month in our final statewide poll of the cycle with Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Polling. We under­stand that KING5, The Seat­tle Times, WSU, and the UW also have one more statewide sur­vey planned in con­junc­tion with Sur­veyUSA. So we will be get­ting at least two more cred­i­ble dat­sets for each of these con­tests before Gen­er­al Elec­tion Day 2022.