Hagan Clings to Lead in N.C. Senate Race; Libertarian Begins to Fade

Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan continues to hold a narrow lead in North Carolina’s closely-contested U.S. Senate race, according to a Public Policy Polling survey released earlier today.

North Carolina is a key battleground in the GOP’s hopes of winning control of the U.S. Senate in November.

Hagan currently enjoys a four-point lead in the widely-watched race, leading Republican challenger Thom Tillis by a margin of 44 percent to 40 percent. Support for little-known Libertarian candidate Sean Haugh, who was polling at eleven percent only three months ago, has dropped to just five percent in the most recent poll. Eleven percent of those surveyed were undecided.

Hagan, who defeated Republican incumbent Elizabeth Dole in 2008, holds a sizeable advantage over Tillis among women, leading her Republican challenger by 16 percentage points in that category. Tillis, the current Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, is favored among male voters by a margin of 48% to 38%.

Hagan holds a commanding 77 to 7 percent lead among likely African-American voters.

The survey didn’t include the spirited write-in candidacy of Mecklenburg County’s John W. Rhodes, a former two-term state legislator and longtime Tillis adversary who unexpectedly entered the race this past summer.

Rhodes is one of three official write-in candidates in the race.

A Huntersville real estate broker and self-described “Jesse Helms Republican,” the former state lawmaker sees little difference between his major-party rivals. They’re “nothing more than the two parties′ mannequins dressed up in a political storefront with all the window dressings, trying to lure citizens into buying the equally cheap wares and future broken promises they are pawning off on the unsuspecting public,” he said recently.

During a recent televised debate between Hagan and Tillis, Rhodes quipped that both candidates should have been wearing fire-suits with the corporate logos of the special interests sponsoring their campaigns.

The PPP survey of 1,266 likely voters was conducted September 11th to 14th and has a margin of error of slightly less than three percent.