Gov. Phil Scott holds a healthy lead over his Democratic challenger, Christine Hallquist, in this year’s race for governor, according to a VPR-Vermont PBS poll published on Monday.
Of those surveyed, 42 percent said they would vote for Scott, the first-term Republican incumbent, while 28 percent said they would vote for Hallquist.
Many Vermonters polled said they still were undecided. Twenty-two percent of the 495 people who answered the question about the governor’s race said they had yet to make up their minds or had no opinion about which candidate they preferred.
In the lieutenant governor’s race, incumbent David Zuckerman holds a double-digit lead over Republican challenger Don Turner.
Rich Clark, a professor of political science at Castleton University, which directed the poll, said Hallquist’s bid for governor has always been an uphill battle, given that Vermonters historically have tended to elect incumbent governors at the end of their first terms. The last time a governor lost after a single term was when Phil Hoff beat F. Ray Keyser in 1962.
However, Clark said he doesn’t see Scott’s 14-point lead as a sign that the race is over.
“There’s still two weeks before the elections, a lot of votes out there to get … and you see that the undecideds are fairly high,” he said. “If the undecideds all break for her and everything else holds steady, she’s won the race.”
The poll shows that Scott still maintains broad support from members of both major parties. Of the Democrats surveyed, 45 percent said they approved of Scott’s performance in office. Twenty-six percent of Democrats said they would vote for Scott, while 50 percent said they would vote for Hallquist.
Among Republicans, Scott maintains a 49 percent approval rating. Seventy percent of Republicans said they would vote for the incumbent governor.
Cameron Russell, Hallquist’s campaign manager, said he was surprised by the results of the poll and said they don’t match up to the enthusiasm for Hallquist that the campaign has seen on the ground.
“This race isn’t over as far as we’re concerned,” he said.
A poll commissioned by the Vermont Democratic Party late last month shows Scott and Hallquist “locked in a statistical tie,” the party claims. The poll, conducted by Tulchin Research, shows Hallquist with 42 percent of the vote and Scott with 50, with a 4.9 percent margin of error.
Russell said he has more confidence in the Tulchin poll because he knows its methodology and isn’t familiar with how the VPR-Vermont PBS poll was conducted.
“I feel confident in the polling we did, and we would not have spent money had we not been trying to be accurate,” he said.