Poll shows Herschel Walker leads Raphael Warnock by 10 points

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker is leading incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock by 10 points, according to a poll released Wednesday by a political action committee supporting the University of Georgia football great.

The survey of 2,500 registered Georgia voters put Walker at 51.4%, compared to 41% for Warnock. The poll was conducted from April 3 through April 16 via landline telephones, cellphones and texts by Alexandria, Va.-based Grassroots Targeting on behalf of Walker’s 34N22 PAC.

34N22 noted in a memo that Walker has built a double-digit lead despite the Warnock campaign blanketing the airwaves with more than $7 million so far this year in ad spending.

“Barring a monumental shift in the political landscape, Herschel Walker is in prime position to be the next United States senator from the state of Georgia,” Republican strategist and Grassroots Targeting founder and CEO Blaise Hazelwood wrote in the memo.

Walker can afford to look beyond next month’s Republican primary to a November general election matchup with Warnock. The GOP frontrunner is polling well ahead of several other Republican Senate hopefuls, whose combined support doesn’t come close to matching his numbers.

The Grassroots Targeting poll also found President Joe Biden’s approval ratings on the decline in Georgia. Only 43.8% of voters surveyed approve of the job Biden is doing, while his approval rating among independents was even lower at 41.9%.

The poll found Warnock’s approval rating at 45.2%.

Warnock has only token Democratic primary opposition in his bid to win a full six-year term in the Senate. He won the seat in a special election runoff in January of last year, defeating incumbent Republican Kelly Loeffler, who has been appointed to the Senate by Gov. Brian Kemp following the retirement of the late Sen. Johnny Isakson in 2019.

The poll had a margin of error of plus-or-minus 1.96%.

This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.