The incumbent U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, leads his likely Republican opponenent Josh Mandel in his re-election bid for his Senate seat this fall.
Rasmussen Reports released a survey of 500 Ohio voters Friday, that showed Senator Brown garnering 44 percent of the votes, leading Mr. Mandel who finished the survey with 40 percent of the votes.
Additionally, 12 percent of the voters surveyed were undecided.
Mr. Mandel, the current Ohio State Treasurer has not yet formally announced that he will be running against Mr. Brown, however he did file with the Federal Election Commission recently.
Ohio is considered to be a battleground state in the upcoming presidential election, and both Democrats and Republicans will be watching the Senate race there closely.
Mr. Brown’s Senate seat is seen as one that would give the Republicans a majority in the Senate if they are able to obtain it from him in the fall.
If President Obama wins re-election this year, Republicans would have to pick up four seats in the Senate in order to become the majority in that chamber of Congress.
“There’s an intersection of a battleground state for president and battleground state for control of U.S. Senate. You’re going to see third-party groups from all across the country spend enormous amounts of money here,” said Kevin Dewine, Ohio Republican Party chairman said in a January interview with Businessweek.
The Rasmussen survey shows a slight drop in popularity for the incumbent Mr. Brown. Last week, Public Polling Policy released a poll of Ohio voters that showed him leading Mr. Mandel by 11 percent.
At just 34 years old, Mr. Mandel has youth on his side but is still relatively unknown after serving three years in the Ohio House of Representatives prior to assuming his current role as the state treasurer.
He is the favorite to win the Ohio Republican party’s upcoming Senate primary race on Super Tuesday.
In contrast, Mr. Brown represented Ohio’s 13th congressional district for 14 years in the U.S. House prior to winning his current seat in the Senate in 2007.
According to his year end filing with the FEC, Mr. Brown raised $1.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2011 for the upcoming Senate race.
The Rasmussen survey was conducted on February 8th, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.
