Representative Debbie Mayfield holds a decisive lead over Representative Ritch Workman

Key Findings

  • Representative Mayfield’s reputation in Indian River County is reflected in a commanding 49% lead over Workman in Indian River County. 47% of all respondents choose Mayfield in a Republican primary ballot test for the 17th State Senate District seat, with 20% picking Workman and 9% with Michael Thomas. Her 27% lead over Workman exceeds the 24% share of respondents who were undecided. Mayfield also enjoys a 15% lead in Brevard County, where Workman is best known.
  • Workman’s name recognition is upside down at a most critical time in the Republican primary campaign. Just 22% of respondents have a favorable impression of Workman to 34% who had an unfavorable impression of him as overseas vote-by-mail ballots reach voters and domestic vote-by-mail ballots arrive in mailboxes next week. An even more problematic sign for Workman is his poor name recognition with respondents who are not already voting for him. Workman’s net favorable name recognition with Mayfield voters was -37%, -49% with Michael Thomas voters and -12% with undecided voters. Should such poor numbers hold for the duration of the campaign, Workman would have little room to grow his share of support.
  • Mayfield is decisively winning the battle of ideological definition, as nearly half of respondents tell us that she is a conservative candidate. 47% of respondents tell Viewpoint Florida that Debbie Mayfield is a conservative candidate, compared to 21% who identified Workman as a conservative candidate. Equally notable is that only 63% of respondents could not assign an ideological brand to Workman despite substantial paid media efforts, compared to 76% who could assign a brand to Mayfield. On top of that, 62% of respondents who could brand Mayfield branded her a conservative, compared to 33% of respondents who could brand Workman. Finally, respondents were slightly more likely to brand Workman a moderate than a conservative, a less-than-ideal place to be in a district where 70% of respondents self-identify as conservative.

Please review the attached topline results and crosstabs for complete review of our findings. And contact us anytime with questions that you may have about our results.

Full Results
Crosstabs


Methodology
The survey was conducted by Data Targeting, Inc on the evening of July 17th, 2016 using interactive voice response technology (IVR). Survey respondents are active registered Republicans in Florida’s newly-redrawn 17th Senate District with landline telephones, and the voter’s likelihood of being included in our sample was proportionate to their likelihood of voting in the 2016 Republican primary elections in August 2016. That is, if a voter’s likelihood of voting in the Republican primary election is calculated to be 50% based on predictive scores developed by Viewpoint Florida, that voter’s chance of being included in our sample is 50%. A total of 877 respondents completed the survey, and their responses are weighted to proportions of voter turnout in the August 2012 Republican primary elections by age, race, gender and county. Results have a margin of error of +/- 3.3% within a confidence interval of 95%.

 

 

For details see Methodology

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