If the election were to happen today, Rhode Island would elect Vice President Kamala Harris to the White House.
The data comes from a “Ocean State Poll” of likely voters, a States of Opinion Project, conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center.
The state would also re-elect Sheldon Whitehouse to his Senate seat, the poll found.
That’s no surprise for a state that has voted Democrat in every presidential election since 1984, when the Ocean State elected incumbent Republican President Ronald Reagan.
That same year, Rhode Islanders voted to hold a state Constitutional Convention, which happened two years later.
But, the recent poll indicates that Rhode Islanders may soon have another chance to revise the state constitution. While 33% remain undecided on the measure, most decided voters said they are in favor of holding a convention, UNH found.
The question appears every 10 years on the Rhode Island ballot and has been voted down as recently as 2014, when voters rejected the measure by a 10% margin, The Herald previously reported.
UNH polled over 650 likely general election voters between Sept. 12 and Sept. 16. In total, 738 individuals completed the survey.
Respondents were polled in the days following Harris and former President Donald Trump’s televised debate on Sept. 10. While 61% of respondents rated Harris’s performance as “very good” or “good,” only 24% thought the same of Trump’s. Nearly half of the respondents found the former president’s performance “very poor.”
Harris currently leads Trump 58% to 38% in the state, the poll reported. Two percent of respondents support Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Only 1% said they were unsure of a candidate.
In the Democratic presidential primary earlier this year, almost 15% of voters in the Ocean State voted “uncommitted” after a nationwide campaign to express disapproval of the Biden administration’s response to the Israel-Hamas war.
Ryan Doherty is a section editor covering faculty, higher education and science & research. He is a junior concentrating in chemistry and economics who likes to partially complete crosswords in his free time.
Tom Li is a metro editor covering the Health & Environment and Development & Infrastructure beats. He is from Pleasanton, California, and is concentrating in Economics and International & Public Affairs. He is an avid RIPTA passenger and enjoys taking (and criticizing) personality tests in his free time.
