New Poll: Toomey-McGinty Race Is Essentially Tied

Katie McGinty photo by Donald Derosa, used under a Creative Commons license

A new poll from Quinnipiac University says that the Senate race in Pennsylvania is very much like the presidential one here: A dead heat.

Sen. Pat Toomey gets 45 percent of the vote in the new poll, while Katie McGinty gets 44 percent. Much like the poll Quinnipiac took of Trump/Clinton, men back the Republican candidate (53–36 percent), while women say they’re going to vote for McGinty (51-38). The pollsters interviewed 1,077 Pennsylvania voters and say the poll has a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points.

It is a long time before the election, and a lot could change. So let’s focus in on what is perhaps the more interesting result from this poll: 57 percent of Pennsylvanians support legalizing small amounts of marijuana for personal use. Thirty-nine percent oppose; the only groups against this change are Republicans and voters over 65 years old.

“The most liberal of the three big swing states on the issue, Pennsylvanians give a big thumbs up to small amounts of marijuana in the hands of adults,” Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, says in a release.

Meanwhile, Pa. voters also support the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court by a 52 percent to 29 percent margin. Thirty percent of voters told Quinnipiac that Toomey’s belief the next president should nominate a Supreme Court justice make them less likely to vote for him.

Follow @dhm on Twitter.