Nevada Republican Senate candidates tout conflicting polls

By Yvonne Gonzalez

Monday, Aug. 28, 2017 | 1:27 p.m.

Republican Sen. Dean Heller is up in his race to beat out GOP challenger Danny Tarkanian. Or down, depending on the poll.

Heller’s campaign commissioned a poll and announced Monday the findings show the incumbent has a 22-point lead over Tarkanian. The release comes on the heels of a separate poll showing Tarkanian with an 8-point lead.

Republican survey research and strategy team The Tarrance Group found Heller is ahead in a survey from Aug. 14-16 of 300 “likely” Republican primary voters throughout the state. Tarrance’s clients in Nevada have included Heller and Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval.

A call to the Tarrance Group was not immediately returned Monday.

JMC Analytics, also a Republican pollster, found Tarkanian was leading in a non-commissioned poll conducted from Aug. 24-25 of 700 Nevada Republicans who tend to vote in primaries. Republican John Couvillon of JMC Analytics said he chose to release the data first through Breitbart News Network after a previous poll by the group caught the attention of the conservative outlet.

Couvillon said JMC Analytics was commissioned last year by KLAS-TV to look at the Senate race in Nevada, where Democrats bucked a national trend of losses in the 2016 General Election. He said he was curious enough about last year’s results to probe how voters felt about Tarkanian.

The margins of error for the two polls were about 2 percentage points apart, at 5.8 percent in the Tarrance poll compared to 3.7 percent for the JMC data.

In a news release about the JMC poll, Tarkanian called it great for the campaign. Heller campaign spokesman Tommy Ferraro, however, said Tarkanian is heading toward losing his sixth race for political office.

“If Danny truly believes the polls he’s touting then I have an equestrian destination resort I’d like to sell him,” Ferraro said in a statement, linking to a 2012 Las Vegas Sun article about a judge’s ruling that the Tarkanian family had to pay a $17 million judgement after a land deal went bad.