A new poll by NBC/Marist shows Tom Cotton leading Mark Pryor 45-40 among likely voters (registered voters divide evenly, 41-41). That’s a big swing from NBC/Marist’s last survey of the race, taken in very early May. It had Pryor leading 51-40. This was only poll in which Pryor cracked 50 percent.
The early May poll was, then, an outlier. But most polls taken around that time had Pryor ahead.
No longer. Tom leads in 8 of the 9 reported surveys taken in the past 4 months.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that Tom’s lead has been slender. The 5 point edge in the NBC/Marist poll is the largest of the bunch. The Real Clear Politics average has Tom only 2 points ahead.
In sum, this is still a very tight race. And we can expect that Pryor, a career politician who sees this Senate as belonging to him and his family, will pull out all the stops as he sees it quite possibly slipping away.
We encourage our readers to support Tom by contributing here. I already have and will do so again.
UPDATE: The CBS News/New York Times Upshot/YouGov Battleground Tracker has Cotton leading Pryor 43-39.
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