More Bad Polling for Heitkamp, Cramer Leads by Five

Yesterday North Dakota’s Senate race was shifted from being a “toss up” to “tilts Republican” by two sources, Roll Call and Fox News.

Today we have some polling which perhaps justifies those shifts. According to an Axios/Survey Monkey poll conducted from June 11 to July 2, Congressman Kevin Cramer is leading incumbent Senator Heidi Heitkamp by five points:

You can read the full polling memo here, and more details about the poll’s methodology here.

Axios describes this poll as “brutal” for Democrats, and they’re not wrong.

In North Dakota, specifically, this poll is consistent with other polling we’ve seen in the race. We’ve now had four publicly available, head-to-head polls in this race and three of them dating back to February show Cramer with a lead in the 4 – 5 point range:

Just one poll, the Gravis Marketing survey in February, has been a bit of an outlier from this trend. The rest show Cramer with a solid, if still relatively small, lead.

But the bad polling news for Heitkamp doesn’t stop there. The folks at Morning Consult have new polling out, and Senator Heitkamp’s approval numbers continue to be low. Heitkamp supporters can perhaps find a silver lining in that the incumbent’s free-fall in her approval numbers has stopped. The ugly trend of declining approval dating back to July of last year seems to have plateaued for now, yet this same poll shows just 35 percent of respondents saying Heitkamp deserves re-election while 50 percent say it’s time for someone else: