Porter leads Gallagher for seat in Congress

Kirsten Searer

Friday, Oct. 1, 2004 | 6:24 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

October 2 - 3, 2004

Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., has a 21-point advantage over Democratic challenger Tom Gallagher, according to a Las Vegas Sun/KLAS TV Channel 8 / KNPR Nevada Public Radio poll.

Porter, who won the 3rd Congressional District seat in 2002, had a 54-33 lead over Gallagher, with 11 percent undecided.

The poll of 300 likely voters was conducted Sept. 20-28 and has a margin of error of 5.7 percentage points.

Support for Porter, according to the poll, crosses party lines and ideologies.

One-quarter of those polled who identified themselves as liberal said they planned to vote for Porter. And 22 percent of Democrats said they would vote for the Republican congressman.

Porter held a 53-35 lead among voters who identified themselves as independent and a 44-35 lead among voters who called themselves moderate.

The nine-day poll started the same day that Porter's campaign unveiled the first of several television ads attacking Gallagher as a political opportunist.

Gallagher's campaign officials said the Porter ads had hurt their candidate's standing in the polls, but said the numbers will change once voters see the response ads.

Mara Gassmann, a Gallagher spokeswoman, said the campaign remains "confident about Election Day and the work that Tom is going to do for Nevada when he's elected."

"The truth is on our side," she said. "We'll be countering over the next four weeks. People are going to get to know Tom and they're going to get to know that Jon Porter is flat-out lying."

But many political watchers say it's going to be tough for Gallagher to take Porter's seat, partly because Porter has name recognition from holding elected office in Southern Nevada for two decades, and partly because the congressman has made no major missteps in his freshman term.

"Porter's going to run away with that race," said Republican consultant Sig Rogich, referring to campaign polls. "He hadn't even really started his own media efforts and he was nine points ahead."

The poll sampled more Republicans than Democrats. The poll sampled 99 Democrats, 123 Republicans and 57 independents.

That contrasts with the divide of Republicans and Democrats in the district. Democrats now enjoy a voter registration edge of 149,161 to 147,241, with 56,409 independents.

In all, 41 percent of the very likely voters polled in this district identified themselves as Republicans, versus 33 percent who identified themselves as Democrats.

Kate Stewart, a partner in the Washington-based polling firm Belden Russonello & Stewart, said the difference is that the poll reflects likely voters rather than registered voters. It so happens that in this poll, more likely voters identified themselves as Republicans than Democrats.

Other polls, done for the campaigns, have shown similar leads for Porter.