Third Independent Poll This Month Shows Berg Leading Heitkamp, Cramer Still Dominating Gulleson
The third independent poll released this month – another from Mason-Dixon sponsored by Valley News Live – shows Rick Berg leading Heidi Heitkamp.
A Forum Communications poll showed Berg with a 10 point lead, and a Rasmussen poll showed Berg’s lead at five. The previous two polls from Mason Dixon showed Heitkamp leading by one point in June, and tied earlier this month. Now the third poll has Berg with a two point lead, showing a decidedly negative trend for Heitkamp.
This is really, really bad for Heitkamp. Of the independent polling, the Mason-Dixon results have always been the best for her showing a very close race. While the poll, on its own, still shows a close race for Heitkamp the trend of the three polls from Mason-Dixon in this race is showing a decided tilt toward Berg.
The average of the three independent polls – from Forum Communications Rasmussen and Mason-Dixon – has Berg with a 4.25% lead.
As you can see from the results, while Heitkamp has sizable leads in Fargo and the Red River Valley, Berg seems to be dominating the rest of the state. That is very important as western North Dakota is going to be a big surge in voters, thanks to the oil boom, that will absolutely be skewing Berg’s way. The truism in North Dakota politics, “win the valley, win the state” may not be so true any more.
The candidates are about even in how positively voters see them – Heitkamp has a few points advantage – but the Democrat has a wide margin among female voters, beating Berg by fifteen points, though Berg has an even larger 19 point advantage among men.
In related news, it goes without saying that Cramer continues to dominate the US House race:
Also, Romney is leading Obama in the state by a predictably wide margin of 14 points.
Update: Meanwhile, in the alternate version of reality Democrats have created for themselves…
