With three weeks until Utah’s 1st Congressional District Democratic primary, Nate Blouin is down by double digits to Ben McAdams in a poll his campaign paid for. He’s using those numbers to argue the other progressives should fall in behind him.
The survey shows McAdams with 37% support (36% hard support + 1% lean), followed by Blouin with 27% (26% +1%), Liban Mohamed with 12%, and Michael Farrell with 7%. Seventeen percent are undecided.
Those numbers are basically unchanged from March, when McAdams was at 36% and Blouin at 23%.
Blouin’s pitch is this: If Mohamed and Farrell, the other progressive candidates, stay in the race, they’ll split the vote and hand the nomination to the more centrist McAdams.
“It's going to be hard for anyone else to win enough support to actually move forward, whereas it would just take a pretty small margin of their voters to come to our side to get me across the line,” Blouin said at a press conference Monday morning.
Last week, Blouin said if the poll didn’t show him with the most support among the three progressive candidates, he would drop out of the race to consolidate support and defeat McAdams. Mohamed and Farrell rejected that call. Ballots have already been printed and start hitting mailboxes this week, meaning it’s too late for anyone to drop out, even if they wanted to.
Blouin and his supporters have shifted to urging voters who favor Mohamed or Farrell to instead get behind Blouin to stop McAdams from winning.
“If it's not a vote for Nate, it's a vote for Ben” Salt Lake County Councilmember Natalie Pinkney said Monday.
The other progressives aren’t buying it.
“I’m not surprised that Nate came out second in a poll funded by him with questions he drafted,” Farrell said in a text message. “People know Nate, and his support is capped around 25-27%.”
Mohamed pointed to his win over McAdams at the Democratic convention as the best gauge for who can beat McAdams.
“The only district-wide democratic contest that has tested who can unite progressives and defeat Ben McAdams remains the Utah Democratic Convention, and we won it with a majority,” Mohamed said. “I will not abandon the thousands of people who organized, participated, and earned that victory. Doing so would undermine not only the movement we have built together, but the very democratic process that brought us here.”
McAdams’ campaign declined comment.
The poll also shows a big name ID gap. 92% of likely Democratic primary voters have heard of McAdams, versus 74% for Blouin—an 18-point recognition gap. Mohamed is at 60%, and Farrell is at 55%.
Favorability ratings tell a similar story. McAdams is +34 (55% favorable, 21% unfavorable). Blouin is +28 (40/12). Mohamed is +23 (29/7). Farrell is +15 (21/6).
The survey was conducted by Upswing Research and Strategy among 402 likely Democratic primary voters from May 27-29 with a margin of error of ±4.9%.
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