U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar maintains a substantial lead over her GOP opponent, Royce White, in the latest MinnPost-Embold Research poll.
The poll found that Klobuchar, a Democrat first elected to the Senate in 2006, leads by 12 percentage points among likely voters (52%-40%). Those results are almost identical to what the MinnPost-Embold Research poll found in September.
Klobuchar became Minnesota’s first female senator in 2006. In 2018, in her third race, she defeated her Republican opponent, Jim Newberger, by a wider margin (24 percentage points) than what these poll results are showing.
Before she was elected to the Senate, Klobuchar served as Hennepin County attorney for eight years. She ran for president briefly in 2020, eventually dropping out and endorsing Joe Biden.
White is a former college basketball star and brief NBA player who has never held public office. In 2022, he ran for Congress, finishing second in a GOP primary in Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District.
The MinnPost-Embold Research poll showed White had the support of 84% of the respondents who identified as Republicans and 1% among Democrats. Klobuchar had the support of 96% of the respondents who identified as Democrats and 8% of those who identified as Republicans.
Support for the two was much closer among independent voters, with 37% supporting Klobuchar and 31% backing White.
The MinnPost-Embold Research poll surveyed 1,734 likely 2024 Minnesota voters between Oct. 16-22. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.
Klobuchar had an overall positive favorability rating with 47% percent of respondents rating her favorable and 37% rating her unfavorable for a net 10% favorable rating.
The poll shows she’s well known in the state, with only 3% of respondents saying they’ve never heard of her, a much lower percentage than that for her fellow Democratic Sen. Tina Smith, who is not up for reelection this year.
The poll also found that Klobuchar had slightly more support among women, with 44% of White’s supporters being male and 38% being female. Fifty-six percent of Klobuchar’s supporters were women and 46% were men. Among the two, Klobuchar had more supporters who identified as people of color (65%) compared with the 27% of White supporters who were people of color. The poll showed that women of color, specifically, supported Klobuchar much more than they did White. Seventy-two percent of women of color in the survey selected Klobuchar, but only 55% of white women did the same.
Editor’s note: Ava Kian wrote this story for MinnPost.com. Kian is MinnPost's Greater Minnesota reporter.
This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
MinnPost is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization whose mission is to provide high-quality journalism for people who care about Minnesota.
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