Graham has wide lead, poll shows

In the Democratic race for governor, Sen. Gwen Graham is ahead by a comfortable margin, an FAU poll shows. Graham’s 29 percent rating compares to Adam Levine’s secondplace rank, with 17 percent of voters supporting him. Andrew Gillum, Jeff Greene and Chris King polled at 10 or 11 percent, while 19 percent are undecided.

Gwen Graham has a significant lead over her closest competitor in the race for the Democratic nomination to run for Florida governor.

Graham had the support of 29 percent of likely Democratic voters in a Florida Atlantic University poll released Tuesday.

Philip Levine was in second place, with 17 percent.

Three other candidates — Andrew Gillum, Jeff Greene and Chris King — were bunched together, farther back, in third place.

The poll from the FAU Business and Economics Polling Initiative reported Gillum with 11 percent, Greene with 11 percent and King with 10 percent.

About 19 percent of Democratic voters are undecided. That share has decreased dramatically since the July survey, when 31 percent were undecided.

The margin of error is plus or minus 6 percentage points, which makes Graham’s and Levine’s positions statistically significant.

“Right now, you’d have to say Gwen Graham is in a pretty good position” barring an unforeseen development, said Keven Wagner, an FAU political scientist.

The results come one week before the end of a tumultuous campaign. Greene, a Palm Beach billionaire, roiled the field when he entered the race in June — a year and a half after the others started running. He’s pumped millions of dollars into campaign advertising. Levine, a multimillionaire and former Miami Beach mayor, has spent millions of his own dollars on campaign advertising.

Much of their advertising has been negative. “Jeff Greene and Philip Levine have been aggressively going after each other, and that’s sort of cleared a bit of a path for Gwen Graham,” Wagner said.

Graham has also been attacked by Greene and Gillum.

Graham, a former congresswoman from north Florida, hasn’t had the same financial firepower, especially in the expensive Miami-Fort Lauderdale television market, home to a large population of Democratic primary voters.

One factor, the poll found, is gender. Graham has support of 32 percent of women — 18 points higher than Levine. They’re tied among men, with 25 percent for Graham and 22 percent for Levine. The margin of error for smaller subgroups, such as men and women, is higher than the 6 percentage points in the overall poll.

In the previous FAU poll, released July 25, the field broke down to two groups. In the upper tier, Graham had a small lead with 20 percent. Levine had 16 percent and Greene at 14 percent, were effectively tied for second place. The second tier in July included King, a Winter Park businessman, with 9 percent and Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, with 7 percent.

The survey released Tuesday, of 239 Democratic registered voters from the Florida Atlantic University Business and Economics Polling Initiative, was conducted online and through automated calls to people with landline telephones Thursday through Monday.

While the survey was being conducted, Gillum held two rallies with U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the unsuccessful candidate for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination who remains a favorite of the progressive wing of the party. Although all the candidates agree on virtually all the issue priorities of Democratic voters, Gillum has been selling himself as the most outspoken champion of liberal ideas, and suggested that Graham is too moderate.

Candidates with a lower percentage of supporters — when it comes from people with great intensity — sometimes do better on Election Day than polls suggest, Wagner said. “It might mean that Gillum’s numbers are higher than they poll. He might do better on Election Day than he polls. But the problem is that’s typically not 10 points higher, that’s a few points.”

Primary day is Aug. 28. Voters have been returning mail ballots for weeks and in-person early voting is taking place statewide. As of Tuesday morning, more than 472,000 Democrats had already voted in the primary.