Martins leads Curran by 8 in campaign poll

Noah Manskar
Jack Martins, a Republican, and Laura Curran, a Democrat, are running for Nassau County executive.

Republican Jack Martins has an eight-percentage-point lead over Democrat Laura Curran in the Nassau County executive race, according to a Martins campaign poll.

The poll, first published Friday by NY State of Politics, shows 45 percent of likely voters choosing Martins to Curran’s 37 percent. Eighteen percent of the 677 voters surveyed said they were undecided.

Dublin, Ohio-based Clout Research, a firm Martins’ unsuccessful congressional campaign used last year, conducted the poll by phone from Aug. 7 to 9. It has a 3.76-percent margin of error.

Martins was the choice of 53 percent of respondents in his former state Senate district covering most of the Town of North Hempstead, usually a Democratic stronghold. Curran, a county legislator from Baldwin, got 33 percent of the votes there.

Some 77 percent of registered Republicans and Conservatives said they would vote for Martins, while 75 percent of Democrats, Green Party and Working Families Party voters chose Curran.

The poll memo says Martins has a five-point favorability advantage over Curran, but does not give specific favorability numbers.

The published polling memo does not mention Nassau Comptroller George Maragos, Curran’s Democratic primary challenger.

All three candidates are running to replace Republican incumbent Edward Mangano, who is not running for a third term following is indictment on federal corruption charges last fall.

Some 60 percent of respondents, including a majority of Democrats, said Martins’ early call for Mangano’s resignation made them more likely to vote for him.

Curran’s campaign disputed the findings, noting Curran’s fundraising advantage and questioning Clout Research’s credibility.

Philip Shulman, a Curran spokesman, said Martins should release the results in their entirety, as state election law requires.

“Frankly, this is nothing more than a desperate move by a desperate campaign that is underfunded and lacking momentum,” Shulman said in a statement.

The Curran campaign noted Fritz Wenzel, Clout’s founder, has supported the false claim that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

His firm Wenzel Strategies did a widely panned 2009 poll for the website WorldNetDaily showing only 51 percent of Americans believed Obama was qualified to be president.

The data journalism website FiveThirtyEight gives Clout Research a “C-” grade on its pollster rankings, which say the firm’s polls are skewed Republican and correctly predict races a third of the time.

In a statement, Maragos called Martins’ poll “completely self serving,” but said “it confirms that the Democrats must vote for George Maragos in the Sept. 12 Primary, if they hope to have a Democratic County Executive on January 1.”

NY – Nassau County Survey Polling Memorandum 8-10-2017 by Nick Reisman on Scribd

Share this Article