A Conservative Intel poll run earlier this week holds nothing but good news for Nevada congressional candidate Danny Tarkanian.
The poll, conducted Monday in Nevada’s third district, shows Tarkanian ahead in the Republican primary race by a comfortable margin. The seat opened up when the current U.S. representative from the third district, Joe Heck, decided not to run for reelection and to enter the race for Nevada’s U.S. Senate seat, held now by the (thankfully) retiring Harry Reid.
Tarkanian, a small business owner, past Republican candidate for Nevada office and son of UNLV basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian, polled at 37 percent, more than triple his nearest competitor, state senator Michael Roberson, who polled at only 11 percent. Andy Matthews, president of the Nevada Policy Research Institute, trailed a distant third with below 4 percent support.
Although nearly half of respondents said that they were undecided or preferred another candidate, Tarkanian’s lead is an immense amount of ground to make up.
Also working in his Tarkanian’s favor is the fact that more than two-thirds of respondents were familiar enough with him to have an opinion of him and over 80 percent of those familiar with him had a favorable opinion of him.
By contrast, only 34 percent and 20 percent of voters are familiar enough with Roberson and Matthews to have an opinion of them respectively and those opinions were split fairly evenly with those respondents who knew their names.
This is especially bad news for Roberson, who was initially thought to be Tarkanian’s toughest competition. So far the numbers indicate that Roberson is in trouble.
318 people responded to the poll, which was conducted by phone using interactive voice response.
