CLEVELAND — According to a recent survey of likely voters, former Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner has a commanding lead among likely Democratic primary voters for the special election to fill Ohio’s 11th Congressional District seat, vacated by Marcia Fudge, now the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Biden administration.
The poll was paid for by the Turner campaign and conducted by Tulchin Research, a reputable progressive polling agency. It found 50% of those polled would vote for Turner in the Democratic primary special election for Congress, if it were held today. That’s an advantage of more than three-to-one over her nearest competitor in the special election, Cuyahoga County Councilmember Shontel Brown, whom 15% of those polled preferred. Twenty-one percent were undecided.
Broken down by ethnicity, Turner was preferred by 52% of Black voters surveyed and 48% of white voters.
"This is a campaign poll, not an objective poll from an outside entity,” said Tom Sutton, a professor of Political Science at Baldwin Wallace University. “Tulchin Associates is a firm that does a lot of polling for progressive candidates, causes, non-profit organizations, but that doesn't take away from the validity of the poll, per se. In fact, it needs to be valid in order for the campaign to have good information to then work with in terms of what their strategy is going to be.”
The survey was conducted from May 20 to May 26 among 600 likely special Democratic primary election voters in Ohio’s 11th Congressional District and contacted voters by landline and cell phone, as well as online through email and text message. The margin of error for the poll is +/- 4%.
The special Primary Election for Fudge's seat will take place on Aug. 3, and the special General Election will take place on Nov. 2.
