The latest Marquette poll is out and it’s sort of good news for Democrats. Kind of.
The bottom line is that Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Crowley still has pretty much the same edge that he held over Republican Tom Tiffany a month or so ago. Although, an already close race appears to be tightening a little.
Crowley now holds a three point lead, 49% to 46% among likely voters. That’s down from a five point lead he held earlier. So, he went from just barely outside the margin of error to just barely inside it.
Independent voters seem to be migrating toward Tiffany, but Crowley still holds a commanding lead among them, 44% to 18%. About 38% of independents now say they’re undecided. Independents’ support for Crowley fell by 11%, but their support for Tiffany only increased by 2%.
And Democrats still maintain a modest advantage in enthusiasm with 85% of them saying they are absolutely certain to vote while 79% of Republicans say the same.
In addition, Donald Trump gets more unpopular by the day. Now, fully 60% of voters disapprove of his job performance while only 38% approve, his lowest rating ever. And only 15% think they are better off now than they were last year.
So, you add all that up and you’d have to say that Crowley maintains a slight advantage heading into the last month of the campaign.
But there are three caution flags for Democrats.
The first is momentum. It’s not a huge shift, but independents are migrating away from Crowley. It’s likely that their stay in the undecided column will be brief and they’ll eventually wander into the Tiffany camp. But that shift would have to be much more dramatic for Tiffany to win.
The second caution is that Tiffany and his third party supporters are outspending Crowley and his supporting groups by a lot, something like three-to-one. They’ve succeeded in running up Crowley’s negatives so that now he’s 13 points under water compared to six points net negative for Tiffany.
And finally, as poll director Charles Franklin pointed out, voters aren’t supporting Democrats, so much as they’re rejecting Trump. If every voter who was sour on Trump was voting for a Democrat you’d expect Crowley to have a 20-point lead. The fact that he’s barely ahead with a Republican in the White House who is this unpopular is testimony to how much long-term trouble his party is in.
That last point is one Democrats will have to keep in mind on November 4th if things go their way the previous evening. Humility should be their mantra. Nobody is choosing the Democrats. The party’s popularity remains at an historic low. So, if they win they will have no mandate. If they’re going to win again in 2028 they have to keep that in mind and figure out how to build support for a positive agenda.
