A plurality of Republican presidential primary voters in Washington State aren’t sure how they feel about Dave Reichert

Neo­fas­cist Don­ald Trump is beloved by the Repub­li­can base in Wash­ing­ton State, but for­mer con­gress­man and guber­na­to­r­i­al hope­ful Dave Reichert has yet to estab­lish a sim­i­lar strong bond with many of the ultra MAGA faith­ful, a sur­vey con­duct­ed last week for the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute indicates.

Asked whether they viewed Reichert favor­ably or unfa­vor­ably, a plu­ral­i­ty of 43% in our poll of Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry vot­ers said they were not sure.

A total of 39% had a favor­able view of Reichert (23% very favor­able, 16% some­what favor­able), while 18% had an unfa­vor­able view.

Despite not hav­ing the bag­gage that Trump has, Reichert was viewed unfa­vor­ably by slight­ly more respon­dents than Trump — we found that 84% of respon­dents have a favor­able view of Trump and 16% have an unfa­vor­able view.

This data is a mixed bag for Reichert. He cer­tain­ly isn’t dis­liked by his par­ty’s base, but they don’t have the same affin­i­ty for him that they do for Trump.

At least not yet, anyway.

But Reichert can take com­fort in this: Our horser­ace polling has found Repub­li­can vot­ers in Wash­ing­ton ready to ral­ly around him in a sim­u­lat­ed head to head matchup with Demo­c­ra­t­ic Attor­ney Gen­er­al Bob Fer­gu­son. If he gets on the gen­er­al elec­tion bal­lot, Repub­li­can vot­ers will mark the oval for him.

And Reichert is on track to get there: he and Fer­gu­son are way, way ahead of their rivals Semi Bird and Mark Mul­let, who our last poll of gen­er­al elec­tion vot­ers found were both in the sin­gle dig­its. That sur­vey, which field­ed a cou­ple weeks before last week’s pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry poll, looked at Reichert’s favor­a­bil­i­ty too. 26% of respon­dents had a favor­able view of Reichert, while 32% had an unfa­vor­able view. 19% were not sure, and 24% had not heard of Reichert.

Those last two cat­e­gories coin­ci­den­tal­ly add up to 43% — the exact same per­cent­age in our poll of Wash­ing­ton State Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry vot­ers who said they were not sure about Reichert.

Long­time polit­i­cal insid­ers know Reichert well. For many years, he was the elect­ed Sher­iff of King Coun­ty — a posi­tion that is now appoint­ed by the King Coun­ty Exec­u­tive — and then he became the Unit­ed States Rep­re­sen­ta­tive for the 8th Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict. He won sev­en con­sec­u­tive elec­tions for that seat (2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016). But he has­n’t appeared on a Wash­ing­ton State bal­lot since Trump faced Hillary Clin­ton, or been very vis­i­ble pri­or to decid­ing to run for gov­er­nor. That has reduced his name ID somewhat.

Here is the exact ques­tion we asked and the answers we received:

QUESTION: What is your opin­ion of Dave Reichert?

ANSWERS:

• Not sure: 43%
• Very favor­able: 23%
• Some­what favor­able: 16%
• Some­what unfa­vor­able: 8%
• Very unfa­vor­able: 10%

We pro­vid­ed no back­ground or bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion about Reichert pri­or to ask­ing this ques­tion. We like to let our respon­dents bring their own knowl­edge and opin­ions to our sur­veys as much as pos­si­ble — that’s how good pub­lic opin­ion research con­duct­ed accord­ing to the sci­en­tif­ic method is done.

Our sur­vey of 522 like­ly 2024 Wash­ing­ton State Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry vot­ers was in the field from Tues­day, Feb­ru­ary 20th through Fri­day, Feb­ru­ary 23rd, 2024.

The poll was con­duct­ed for NPI by Civiqs, among select­ed mem­bers of the firm’s research pan­el. All sam­pled indi­vid­u­als were emailed by Civiqs and respond­ed using a per­son­al­ized link to the sur­vey at civiqs.com. The sur­vey has a mar­gin of error of ± 5.5% at the 95% con­fi­dence lev­el, account­ing for the design effect.

Like­ly Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry vot­ers are respon­dents who answered “Yes, in the Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry” to ques­tion 1 of the sur­vey, which asked if they were plan­ning to vote in the Wash­ing­ton pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry in March. Respon­dents must have also self-iden­ti­fied as a Repub­li­can or Inde­pen­dent in a pre­vi­ous Civiqs sur­vey. Only Repub­li­can and Inde­pen­dent vot­ers in Wash­ing­ton were sampled.

The fil­ing peri­od for offices sub­ject to elec­tion in 2024 will take place in May. The August Top Two elec­tion will con­clude on Tues­day, August 6th and the Novem­ber gen­er­al elec­tion will con­clude on Tues­day, Novem­ber 5th.