Poll shows Klobuchar maintains a significant lead over whites

According to the latest MinnPost-Ebold Research poll, US Senator Amy Klobuchar maintains a significant lead over her Republican opponent, Royce White.

The poll showed Klobuchar, a Democrat first elected to the Senate in 2006, with a 12 percentage point lead (52-40%) among likely voters. These results are almost identical to the results of 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 larger margin (24 percentage points) than polls showed.

Before being elected to the Senate, Klobuchar was a Hennepin County attorney for eight years. She briefly ran for president in 2020, but ultimately dropped out and supported Joe Biden.

White is a former college basketball star and short-lived NBA player who has never held public office. He ran for Congress in 2022, finishing second in the GOP primary for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District.

The MinnPost-Embold Research poll found White had the support of 84% of respondents who identified as Republicans and 1% among Democrats. Klobuchar had the support of 96% of 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% supporting White.

The MinnPost-Embold Research poll polled 1,734 likely voters in Minnesota in 2024 from Oct. 16-22. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.

Klobuchar received an overall positive favorability rating: 48% of respondents rated her favorably and 37% rated her as unfavorable, for a 10% net favorable rating.

Polling shows she’s well-known in the state, with just 3% of respondents saying they’ve never heard of her, a much lower percentage than her Democratic colleague, Sen. Tina Smith, who isn’t running for re-election this year .

The poll also found that Klobuchar had slightly more support among women, with 44% of White’s supporters being men and 38% being women. 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 to 27% of White supporters who were people of color. The poll found that women of color in particular supported Klobuchar much more than white women. Seventy-two percent of women of color in the poll chose Klobuchar, but only 55% of white women did the same.

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