Independent Poll Shows Cicilline Leading, Under 50 Percent

By Scott Bland  //  October 1, 2012 | 6:45 p.m.

While a Boston Globe poll Monday showed Democratic Rep. John Tierney's fortunes declining in Massachusetts, another endangered New England Democrat got a bump from public polling this evening. Freshman Democratic Rep. David Cicilline leads Republican challenger Brendan Doherty in WPRI-TV's latest poll of Rhode Island's 1st Congressional District, though he is not gaining majority support.

Cicilline leads Doherty in the poll, 44 percent to 38 percent, with 10 percent of voters undecided and the remaining 6 percent choosing independent David Vogel. Fleming and Associates conducted the poll for WPRI and interviewed 250 likely voters from Sept. 26-29. The poll has a large margin of error of plus-or-minus 6.2 percentage points.

Cicilline's performance has improved markedly since WPRI found him pulling support from just one-third of voters and Doherty near majority support in February, when Cicilline's image was reeling after revelations that Providence was left with enormous budget problems after his stint as mayor. The incumbent has made a similar case as in his 2010 bid, hitting Democratic themes like infrastructure spending and withdrawal from current wars, while tying Doherty to the national Republican Party. President Obama took two-thirds of the vote in the 1st District in 2008, and that would prove an anchor on the otherwise popular Doherty's Election Day prospects if Cicilline can pull it off successfully.

Though the poll has a small sample size and large margin of error, it confirms the results of two Democratic polls released in September, one from Cicilline's campaign and one from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Both mid-September polls showed Cicilline at 46 percent and Doherty in the mid-30s. Cicilline's job approval numbers are still upside-down in the WPRI poll. Thirty-eight percent of respondents said Cicilline was doing an "excellent" or "good" job in Congress, while 55 percent rated him "fair" or "poor." Forty-six percent of voters view Doherty positively (a different measure from Cicilline's job approval), while 22 percent view him unfavorably.

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