Republican Senate candidate Tom Cotton holds a small lead over Democratic senator Mark Pryor in an internal poll released today by the Cotton campaign. The poll of 600 likely voters in Arkansas found 42 percent support Cotton and 40 percent support Pryor. See the full release here.
That’s a much different picture than what some recent independent polls have shown, including an NBC News/Marist poll that gave Pryor an 11-point lead and 51 percent support. But that one and other polls have been surveying registered voters, which tend to lean more Democratic than actual voting patterns. The last independent poll of likely voters found Pryor with a 3-point lead at the beginning of April.
As the pollster’s memo points out, the Cotton campaign poll has an even partisan split in its sample, with both Democrats and Republicans at 36 percent and independents at 26 percent.
